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DEMOCRACY 
AND IDEALS 

JOHN ERSKINE 



DEMOCRACY 
AND IDEALS 

A Definition 



BY 



JOHN ERSKINE 

PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 

AUTHOR OF "the MORAL OBLIGATION TO BE 

INTELLIGENT," "tHE SHADOWED 

HOUR," ETC. 




NEW HI Mr YORK 
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



COPYRIGHT, 1920, 
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 



©CI.A570482 



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



m 26 i3;^o 



TO 

ROBERT IRWIN REES 

IRA LOUIS REEVES 

CHARLES W. EXTON 

FRANCIS F. LONGLEY 

CITIZENS OF THE REPUBLIC 



PREFACE 

These chapters, with the exception of the first and 
the last, were written while I was serving as chair- 
man of the Army Education Commission with the 
American forces in France in 1918 and 1919, and as 
educational director of the American Expeditionary 
Force University at Beaune, 1919. The first chap- 
ter, in its present form recently rewritten, was 
originally prepared as an address before the Asso- 
ciation of Colleges and Preparatory Schools of the 
Middle States and Maryland, in November, 1917. 
** American Character" was delivered as a lecture 
at Bedford College, London, December 6, 1918, and 
was published in the Fortnightly Eeview, May, 1919. 
"French Ideals and American" was delivered as an 
address before American troops and other American 
audiences in France during 1918 and 1919, and was 
published May 20, 1919, as Bulletin 100 of the 
American Expeditionary Force University at 
Beaune, ''Society as a University," prepared as 
an address for the opening of the University at 
Beaune, was published March 15 as Bulletin 18 of 
that institution, and was reprinted in the Educa- 
tional Review for September. ''Universal Training 
for National Service" was written at Beaune in 
April, and was published in the Eeview of Reviews 
for October. "University Leadership" was de- 
livered on September 24 as the opening address for 
the winter session of Columbia University. 



viii PREFACE 

Though composed at different times and places, 
these chapters were intended to form one study of 
the American character and its needs. The first 
three chapters try to define our condition at the 
present moment ; the second group of these chapters 
would make suggestions toward progress and im- 
provement. I have tried to express here from sev- 
eral angles a central conviction that we in the 
United States are detached from the past, and that 
this detachment is the striking fact in all our prob- 
lems ; that if in the future we are to become and to 
remain a nation, we must collaborate for common 
ends ; that our immediate task is to define those com- 
mon ends; and that though this task is extremely 
difficult, the war may have helped us toward its ao- 
compKshment — toward a definition of our ideals and 
toward the method by which they are to be realized. 

If in these pages I speak primarily as an educator, 
it is not because I would unduly glorify my profes- 
sion or blind myself to interests outside the school- 
room and the study. Precisely because we are all 
concerned nowadays with the general interests of 
our fellows, I believe that our national problems are 
problems in education. Our task is to provide equal 
opportunity for all citizens — which means equal 
preparation to make use of the opportunity. We 
must provide also for the sake of democracy enough 
general knowledge of life — of other lives than our 
own — to insure in each of us a sjnnpathy with the 
problems of the community as a whole ; and complete 
knowledge of life, I have tried to say with emphasis, 
implies training also for the proper enjoyment of 
leisure. 

Because my experiences with our armies in 
France gave me great hope for what American edu- 



PREFACE ix 

cation may yet accomplish at home in times of peace, 
I have dedicated this book to four friends with 
whom I worked abroad and who illustrate the type 
of citizenship that seems to me admirable. Brigadier- 
General Rees of the 5th Section of the General Staff 
was in command of all the non-military educational 
work in the A. E. F. Under him, Colonel Reeves 
was in command of the American Expeditionary 
Force University at Beaune, Colonel Exton com- 
manded the American officers and men who were 
students at the University of Paris and at other 
French universities, and Colonel Longley com- 
manded the American officers and men who studied 
at British Universities. 

John Ebskinb. 
Columbia University, 'April, 1920, 



CONTENTS 

I PAOB 

Democracy and Ideals 15 

II 

American Character 39 

III 
French Ideals and American 68 

IV 

Society as a University 95 

V 

Universal Training for National Service . . . 118 

VI 

University Leadership ." 133 



n 



V 



DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 



DEMOCRACY 
AND IDEALS 

I 

DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 



This subject of demooraoy and ideals ouglit to 
interest us, even if there had been no war, for the 
ideals of any citizenship which we like to call demo- 
cratic are formulated chiefly in the hope and in the 
mood of peace. But it was the war which forced us 
to take stock of our democracy, to see how much of it 
we had on hand and how we i^^" \ '^o dispose of 
it; it was the war which coir ^ile'^ ■• to define, or 
to try to define, our ideaJs. \ . ^. the task not 

easy. We had moments of impatie, oe when Prussia 
challenged us to state our objects in the war, an^ our 
government did not reply with a facile catai^ 
We should have liked the government, of course, ta 
state precisely what we were aiming at, and by the 
statement to overwhelm the enemy with conscience- 
stricken confusion. Those of us who are teachei^ 
and educators, however, ought to have known hoT^r 
hard it is to define an ideal. When we are asked, ■ 

15 ^-f 



16 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

as we sometimes are even in times of peace, just 
what we are trying to achieve in our schools and 
colleges, our gratitude flows toward any man or 
woman who can answer for us. There may be rea- 
sons why a government, acting for a whole country, 
should hesitate to announce its war-aims, even if it 
clearly knows them ; but now that peace is restored 
the obligation returns upon the individual citizen 
to articulate, at least to himself, what he would make 
of his own life, and what he desires should be the 
character of the democracy he lives in. 

Most of us do not know our own ideals. What is 
worse, many of us do not understand what an ideal 
is. However rude may seem this summary of our 
condition, it is not unjust. The ways of thought 
which pass for wisdom in education, in politics, in 
society to-day, make little use of the concept or of 
the word "ideal"; they are far from the civilization 
which defined that concept and which gave us that 
word; they point somewhat exclusively to nature 
and to various things called natural — to rights, to 
instincts, to impulses, to emotions ; and consequently 
they fail to consider what alone makes man humane 
— his intelligent purposes and his conscious will to 
pursue them. In current speech whatever is ideal 
is understood either to be the undesirable opposite 
of the real, or else to belong to a better world, vainly 
dreamt of in present conditions. But an ideal, prop- 
erly d^imed, is both the child and the father of the 
real; it is both desirable and practicable; it is the 
solution of a present need which imagination pro- 
poses — imagination at once directed and subdued by 
experience, at once fortified and restrained by the 
jvill. 



DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS I7j 

Ideals so defined are the oonunon steps by wMchi 
the reason marches. The maid setting the table first 
imagines the table set, and then imitates that vision. 
The tailor imagines a garment made, and then copies 
it. The merchant contemplates his business as it 
should be six months hence, and then makeS his ac- 
tual affairs adapt themselves to that foresight. In 
each case the ideal is directed and subdued by ex- 
perience ; the table is set with reference to the needs 
of the diners and with reference to the supply of 
food, the garment depends upon the material and 
upon the needs of the wearer, and the business will 
be controlled by the amount of the merchant's 
capital and by the state of trade. In this sense, then, 
to have ideals means to have a clear vision of our 
immediate purposes. In this sense my subject, 
* ' Democracy and Idealism, ' ' is roughly equivalent to 
''Democracy and what it wants." 

It is not quite enough, however, to know what we 
want.- An ideal is not genuine, even though it be 
practicable, until our will is enlisted to achieve it. 
Unless our ideals are fortified by our determination 
to accomplish them, by our disposition to master the 
means necessary for their accomplishment, it is 
obvious that our ideals will not take living form — 
will not replace in experience the reality which begot 
them. And unless our ideals are restrained as well 
as fortified by the will, unless they are restrained by 
a resolve to accomplish them in the known condi- 
tions of life, there is no phantasy so wild that it 
might not be called an ideal. The second half of our 
definition, therefore, is so important that I venture 
to repeat it ; an ideal is the solution which imagina- 
tion proposes for a present need — imagination at 



U.8 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

ionoe directed and subduefd by experience, at onoe 
fortified and restrained by the will. 

With, this definition we ask ourselves what our 
ideals are. For the purposes of the moment we re- 
state our subject as a double theme: "What democ- 
racy wants, and how resolutely it wants it" 



n 

If an ideal is a solution to a present need, we must 
not be surprised that nations and individuals find it 
hard at short notice to name their ideals. It takes 
time and reflection to discover what our needs are, 
or to state them rationally, for to any situation we 
are likely to react with our whole nature, with 
emotions much more than with reason. Man, as we 
are often reminded, is rational only at times, and 
then usually under compulsion. If the war was for 
us one of those crises which for^ men to think, we 
could not expect the thinking to be immediately 
fruitful or satisfying. Not only is it difficult at all 
times to know ourselves, but in moments so dis- 
tressed as those of our entry into the war there is 
danger always of becoming entangled in words — as 
in this instance there was danger of believing that 
our ideals were liberty and democracy, without 
stopping to reflect that the enemy might also be 
fighting for the same words but in a quite different 
sense. There was danger that our ideals, though 
more than catchwords, might not be completely 
genuine ; they might be pleasant to contemplate only 
so long as we need not put them into effect. There 



DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 19 

was danger also of overlooking a fact peculiar to 
the United States, that our ideals have been re- 
cruited by inunigration, and that the ideals of many 
of our citizens are solutions of needs discovered in 
the old world, but not perhaps existing here. 

This fact is important to any dear understanding 
of the United States. "We are a nation of immi- 
grants, and many of us brought to these shores 
dreams and desires which sprang naturally out of 
the conditions we left behind, but which have little 
to do with conditions here. For this reason such an 
inventory of our ideals as the war compelled us to 
make would have discovered, at any point in our 
history, that not all our ideals were genuine, not all 
American or democratic, not all quite what we 
thought they were. -Some of our forefathers came 
here, we say, for liberty of conscience, an ideal 
which they had imagined after experience of 
persecution in Europe. But there is little reason to 
think that the ideal of religious liberty was at first 
genuine. In his ironic tale, ^'Endicott and the Red 
Cross," Hawthorne portrays the pillory and the 
stocks which the Puritan liberty-lovers set up at 
once for those whose doctrines did not agree with 
theirs. If religious liberty is the one ideal which 
we have most nearly achieved in this country, our 
will to achieve it has been developed in response to 
needs discovered here, not remembered from over- 
seas ; we have learned here that religious toleration 
is necesary to the well-being of the modem state. 
A second group of our forefathers came here, we 
say, for political liberty, for equal political oppor- 
tunity. Not only have we failed to achieve this 
liberty, but we do not all of us desire to achieve it; 



go DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

it is not yet a genuine ideal. On the contrary we 
wish to retain for ourselves some political oppor- 
tunities which we withhold from negroes and 
orientals. We defend ourselves at times by saying 
that in this problem economic rather than political 
equality is involved. This defense surprises those 
people who have thought economic equality one of 
our ideals. Of course they were wrong to think so. 
When we talk of economic liberty in the United 
States, we deceive no one but ourselves, so long as 
we maintain a tariff, or so long as one group of 
workers demand exceptionally high wages at the ex- 
pense of other groups. If all these ideals are some- 
thing less than genuine, we perhaps hope that at 
least we have a sincere desire to provide equal op- 
portunities in education. This ideal might indeed 
be genuine if we knew what it means, but we have 
misplaced the word "equal," and we pedagogues 
most often give our attention to-day to so-called 
systems which promise, not equal opportunities in 
education, but identical results. The fashionable 
variations of the kindergarten will see to it that the 
children of the rich have the same tactile sensitive- 
ness as the children of the poor; and the modem 
school, by abolishing all subjects that are diflScult 
to teach and therefore often badly taught, will 
make sure that our ignorance of the best that has 
been said and thought in the world is distributed 
evenly. 

But under all our present and past ideals, whether 
genuine or not, lies the assumption that America is 
an Eldorado, a place where life will yield wealth 
and happiness without corresponding exertion on 
our part — a place, that is, where ideals are realized 



DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS Slj 

•with slight effort of the will. This flattering hope 
served as motive for those hazardous voyages in the 
sixteenth century of which Hakluyt preserved the 
fascinating story; the same hope reappears in so 
recent a book as *'An American in the Making," 
Mr. Ravage's illuminating account of the motives 
which tring immigrants to this country. His fellow- 
villagers left Roumania and came to New York, he 
tells us, because a boy who had previously emigrated 
made a return visit to his native hearth dressed in 
a long coat and a silk hat, and the popular imagina- 
tion soon defined New York as a place where all 
Roumanian villagers have a chance, not of enjoying 
social and political equality, but of becoming the 
leading citizen — ^possibly of becoming the mayor. So 
long as the notion of Eldorado persists, of our coun- 
try as a land of special privilege, how can the ideal 
of economic liberty be genuine ? "What we are after 
is not equality of fortune nor of opportunity, but 
success for ourselves above our fellows, or else 
wealth acquired without effort. 

The thought of America as an Eldorado can be 
made to illustrate not only the uncertain state of our 
ideals, but also the brief transition by which they 
might become genuine. What would it mean to us 
if we developed this subconscious sense of an El- 
dorado into a clear and resolute vision ! In natural 
resources, in climate and in location our country 
has what we might call aptitudes for being made a 
land of magic; but it must be made — it will not be 
so without our effort. The Eldorado which the 
immigrant thinks of is a wild, an irresponsible 
dream, the product of his past needs, of his former 
poverty and discouragement, but not a complete 



&2 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

ideal, since it is not fortified and restrained by the 
will. Were we determined to bring this dream to 
pass, were we willing to learn the science and the 
self-control which must precede this achievement, 
the old fables of a fortunate land would come true. 
But to live by habit in the presence of an obvious 
yet neglected opportunity, may perhaps be tlie most 
disastrous experience for morals and for ideals; 
perhaps we have become used to shirking the re- 
sponsibility which should follow upon a clear sight 
of needs and purposes. 



m 

What were our ideals, while we were in the midst 
of the war? And what are our ideals, now that peace 
returns? We should not be troubled if it appears 
that they are quite new, ideals such as our fore- 
fathers never dreamt of ; the needs that beset us to- 
day are also quite new. The danger is not that we 
should be found inconsistent, not that we should be 
slow in defining our ideals ; t^e danger was during 
the war, and still remains, that we should not see 
our present condition as it really is, and that we 
should therefore fail to orient our purposes with 
reference to our true needs. 

During the war, for example, we were in danger 
of orienting our purposes, not by the needs of the 
civilization for which we fought, but by our enmity 
with Germany. Were we not beginning to define a 
patriotic school as one in which the German language 
was not studied? Were we not beginning to define 



DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 23 

a good opera season as one in wliich no modem Ger- 
man opera was produced? Had the war continued, 
how long would it have been before we were con- 
vinced that a good book is any book not written by 
a German? There was danger, I say, of turning the 
emotions of a temporary crisis into articulate and 
fixed purposes. Some of us refuse to accept them 
as our ideals. Our quarrel with the Germans was 
deep, and still is; the grounds of it can be stated, 
and unfortunately the end of it is not yet seen. But 
with German music or with the German language or 
with German books when they express the nobler 
Germany, we have no quarrel. Every nation needs 
the best that other nations can give it ; we should be 
infinitely poorer without Beethoven and Wagner, 
without Grimm's fairy tales, let us say, and in the 
common sphere of daily life, without the good ex- 
ample of German industriousness. As for the lan- 
guage, if there is to be a generation of Americans 
who neither read nor speak German, and if there 
is to be, as now seems but too probable, a long period 
of suspicion between us and the enemy, it is not 
likely that the Germans will imitate our stupidity so 
far as to neglect the study of English. They wiU 
understand what we are thinking and saying, and 
we shall keep ourselves in even greater ignoraiice of 
their interests and aspirations than we have hitherto 
been. The French, by way of contrast, who know 
better than we do what it is to suffer at the hands 
of the German, are too wise to cease their study of 
him, of his language, and of all his works. If ever 
he shows a disposition to be a good neighbor, they 
may disembarrass their mind of him, but not till 
then. 



24 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

If we state our ideals in terms of genuine spiritual 
needs, as we now understand them, we shall make 
clear those respects in which we would gladly ad- 
mire Germany, the accomplishments in music and 
in literature, and the common industriousness, and 
at the same time we shall define the profound dif- 
ference between the Germans and ourselves, a dif- 
ference which the signatures at Versailles could do 
nothing to heal. From the utterances of modem 
German philosophers and from the behavior of Ger- 
many in the war, we understand that the German 
ideal is to be natural, in a Darwinian sense. Nature 
is the scene of warfare and struggle, in which the 
fittest survive. Nature is also the impulse to strive 
and the energy which sustains us in the struggle. 
This is the prospect which man sees when he looks 
upon the life of other animals; it should become, 
thinks Germany, the pattern of man's own conduct. 
To survive is to be the fittest, and the means to sur- 
vive, different in different animals, is whatever na- 
ture provides. With such a philosophy the worst 
brutalities of war, the most cynical betrayal of faith, 
become excusable because they are natural. It is 
natural for an animal in hunger to be ruthless at 
sight of food ; the ruthlessness is unmoral, merely an 
indication of hunger. It is still more natural for 
fortunate animals to push the less fitted to the wall ; 
the impulse by itself indicates a masterly spirit, 
likely to survive. This is what we see in nature, I 
repeat, and man may if he choose decide that it is 
best to go with his impulses, to be what his propen- 
sities would suggest, to do what he would have 
done had he never become civilized, but to do it 
more efficiently. 



DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 25 

Over against this decision we set an ideal of lib- 
erty, a kind of liberty which we might not have de- 
fined for ourselves had not the war compelled us. 
Granting that nature seems cruel, rapacious and 
vindictive, we believe that man enjoys liberty only 
when he frees himself from these natural tendencies 
— only when by virtue of his reason and his will he 
takes control of nature, and directs its tragic caprice 
to happy uses. The wind bloweth where it listeth, 
and the leaf blows with the wind ; but man can move 
against the wind, or stand still, and the more in- 
telligent he becomes, the more freely can he choose, 
and the heavier is his responsibility for the choice he 
makes. If to continue alive be the only ambition for 
the soul, then the means to life must be had at all 
costs, even at the cost of other lives ; but reason may 
decide that rather than pay an inhuman price it is 
better not to save ourselves, that it is better to die 
than to make the life-hunger an excuse for cruelty, 
or even when the question involves no peril of death, 
that it is better not to succeed than by success to 
become ignoble. Reason may teach us an ideal of 
freedom in which the best parts of our old ideals 
will be summed up and restated — freedom for each 
one of us to be humane, without constraint of poverty 
or persecution, and without the more insidious con- 
straint of an inadequate philosophy. When Ger- 
many defends the sinking of the "Lusitania," on 
the ground that war is war, and that a nation which 
still allows negroes to Tdc lynched is in no position to 
say what is civilized and what is not, we refuse to 
debate with her on such grounds, not because her 
argument is strong, but because we have no premises 
in common. The Germans sank the "Lusitania"; 



^ DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

let it be said that we have allowed negroes to be 
burned at the stake. The difference between us and 
Germany is that we wish to live in a mnlization 
where such actions are considered crimes. This dif- 
ference was not wiped out by the signing of the 
armistice nor by the signing of the peace treaty. 
In the early part of the war the German propaganda 
tried to obscure the fact that the government at Ber- 
lin broke its word whenever it seemed convenient; 
some of us found it hard to believe that there was a 
whole people who, in the accepted meaniug of the 
words, had no sense of honor. But during the peace 
negotiations Germany burned the captured French 
flags rather than return them. Perhaps it was an 
irresponsible mob that made the bonfire, and per- 
haps the German police are too disorganized to con- 
trol such demonstrations. But did any German ex- 
press any regret that his country's faith was once 
more in question? Just before the signing of the 
peace treaty, the Germans sank their fleet, though 
in the treaty they were pledged to give up the ves- 
sels. This was not the action of a mob. It was the 
deliberate trick of a faithless government, applauded 
unanimously by a faithless people. If we need fur- 
ther illustrations of the difference between German 
ideals and our own, we can find them almost daily 
in the explanations which former leaders in the Prus- 
sian government give to account for their defeat. 
Many grave errors were committed, they say. It 
was an error to begin the U-boat murders — not be- 
cause the submarine campaign was dastardly, but 
because the submarines could not sink as many 
ships as was expected. It was an error to shoot 
Captain Frey and Edith Cavell — not because the 



DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 27 

Grennaii apologist reckons even now with the obliga- 
tions of chivalry, but because those two executions 
steeled British hearts against Prussia, for this gen- 
eration and perhaps for centuries. It was an error 
also, it now seems, to play fast and loose with the 
United States, not because falsehood and treachery 
are in themselves embarrassing to the German 
memory, but becaujse the United States, once in the 
war, proved more formidable than Germany had 
expected. 

In one obvious sense the German ideal was most 
dangerous for us during the conflict, for at that time 
the German was putting it into execution, and the 
logic of it impelled him to annihilate us if he could. 
But in more subtle ways also the doctrine that man 
should be natural is laying siege to our character, 
though seldom under a German name. I refer again 
to those educational theories and alas ! to those edu- 
cational practices which would train, or permit, the 
young to develop their instincts and impulses, rather 
than free them from the tyranny of those impulses 
and instincts. The most dangerous form of this 
surrender to nature is the cult of irresponsibility, 
of anarchy, which just now spreads fast among us. 
No ideal is genuine unless the will is enlisted to 
make it real, and liberty of any kind is but an empty 
word unless those who shout it and call for it will 
undertake the responsibility of getting and keeping 
it. w-Tf we are to remain free, we must obviously as- 
sume our share in the drudgery of freedom, we must 
exercise forbearance toward the idiosyncrasies of 
others, and we must keep our promises, even though 
it be to our own hurt. In the maintenance of in- 
tellectual liberty, a liberty maintained by discussion, 



28 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

we must tell the whole truth; it is only the whole 
truth that will make us free. Clearly we are not in 
the mood nowadays to assume this particular re- 
sponsibility. We dislike to tell the whole truth 
about Germany, because if we did, we should have 
to mention some admirable qualities, and we wish 
not to admire the enemy. Yet to force our reason 
into the service of a war emotion, is hardly to enjoy 
intellectual liberty; rather it is to imitate the Ger- 
mans at their worst. Similarly we dislike to tell 
the whole truth of our opponents in political cam- 
paigns. We do not concede the numerous successes 
of the administration we wish to supplant ; if we did, 
there would be nothing left but to point out, as a 
lame conclusion, the respects in which we think we 
could do better. It seems more dramatic to charge 
the other party with complete failure, and to add 
broad hints or even plain assertions that our op- 
ponents are crooks. In our academic world, where 
freedom is essential to the advance of knowledge, we 
scholars are not always scrupulous to tell the whole 
truth about those with whom we differ. If we are 
persuaded that school boards or college trustees fail 
in this point or that to give scholarship its proper 
encouragement, we think we strengthen our case if 
we suppress the fact that school boards and trustees 
are not complete failures, but have in fact rendered 
service to education. It seems prudent to many of 
us, moreover, to suppress the fact that not all teach- 
ers take their profession nobly or even seriously. 
By telling only part of the truth, we do succeed in 
arousing public clamor, but we conceal the points at 
which intelligent progress might be made. 
The advantages of liberty are so obvious that we 



DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 29 

pause to ask why men are not careful to tell the 
whole truth, are not careful to exercise the utmost 
self-restraint, in order that at least the liberty we 
have achieved may be handed down to our children. 
It is this disposition toward anarchy, a more dan- 
gerous enemy, I repeat, than the German philosophy, 
which leads us, not to preserve our ideals, but to loot 
them. Is there some liberty already achieved 1 Then 
let us seize all we can of it, let us exercise it without 
responsibility, let us exhaust it as a selfish tenant 
might exhaust another man's land, and let the other 
man restore his inheritance as he may. If ideals are 
attained in this world by self-discipline and by co- 
operation, there is always a temptation for the mean 
spirited to seize more than his share, without co- 
operating at all ; if only he is the first to do this, he 
is fairly sure that his more conscientious fellows will, 
for a while at least, try to make good his theft by 
taking extra responsibilities upon themselves. Un- 
fortunately, when too many citizens become an- 
archists, there are not enough of the conscientious 
to maintain an ideal for the selfish to loot. 

If the ideal of natural force is connected to-day 
with the practices of Germany, this ideal of anarchy, 
of freedom without responsibility*, has in recent 
years been connected, at least in popular thought, 
with the events in Eussia. When we know clearly 
what is going on in Eussia, we shall probably find 
that other issues are involved than the ideal of 
anarchy. But for years the doctrine of philosophic 
anarchism has quite naturally prospered in Eussia, 
and has quite naturally been imported into the 
United States. Anarchy as an ideal takes root in 
countries which have a strong government, whether 



80 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

autocratic or democratic. You can neglect your re- 
sponsibilities only when some one else does the work 
for you. Of course, if your government shoots or 
hangs the anarchist, he can hardly be said to loot his 
ideal ; but if it treats him in any less severe way than 
by killing him, his philosophy compels the govern- 
ment to make some provision for his existence, since 
he makes none for himself. Should the government 
collapse, however, it is no more possible to continue 
to be an anarchist than it would be for Robinson 
Crusoe on his lonely isle. I know the anarchist 
agrees that when government comes to an end, 
anarchy, the negation of government, must also 
end; but you must first be an anarchist before you 
are willing to describe life in terms of government 
and governed, rather than in terms of ideals and 
responsibilities. The fact remains that in a state 
where no one else assume your responsibilities for 
you, as on Crusoe's isle, you must assume them your- 
self or you die. You are back in that state of im- 
mediate struggle which the German theorists have 
glorified, and which it is the imhappy fortune of 
Russia to illustrate to-day. 

Lx this will to be irresponsible arose in Russia, it 
has found a kindred ideal to blend with in that 
American persuasion I spoke of, that life here is 
and should be an Eldorado, an acquisition of im- 
eamed wealth and happiness. We are individualists, 
we say, but in frankness we should describe ourselves 
more precisely. The Renaissance man was an in- 
dividualist. He desired to develop to the utmost 
every talent he had, for the sake of a large career and 
a lasting fame. "We do not particularly wish to 
develop our talents nor the resources of our country; 



DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 31 

such a program would involve patience, determina- 
tion, drudgery. What we wish is to avoid responsi- 
bility. So strong is our selfishness that even those 
political philosophies which rest entirely on the ideal 
of life in common soon disintegrate when imported 
to our soil. The socialists in America to-day are 
rapidly becoming anarchists. The ideal of the 
state's responsibility toward the individual they 
still cling to, as all anarchists do, but they say noth- 
ing of the individual's responsibility toward the 
state. During the war they criticized the govern- 
ment and they refuse to see an essential difference 
between the German ideal and ours, but so far as I 
know they at no time said or did anything which 
would increase the individual's sense of responsi- 
bility toward society in that time of need. While 
the war lasted it was the non-socialist who did the 
social things, who conserved the food supply, regu- 
lated prices in the interest of society, organized the 
relief of the destitute, and brought medical science 
to bear not only upon the care of wounded soldiers 
but also upon the improvement of the common health 
after the war. The professional socialist profited 
from the carrying out of what were once his pro- 
fessed ideals, but he did not help to carry them out 
— or if he did help, he was so out of tune with his 
organized party that he resigned or was dropped 
from it. In the confusion of our motives we said 
that the socialist was spreading a German influence 
among us, but in so saying we failed to discriminate 
among our perils. Whatever else Germany was, it 
was a highly social state, and though it may have 
been willing for war purposes to see anarchy spread 
in Russia and in the United States, it always knew 



32 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

the danger of anarchy and was as far as possible 
from entertaining it as an ideal. But in our democ- 
racy, among a growing number of us, the enjoy- 
ment of liberty without responsibility is an ideal, 
and one illustration of its influence is this tendency 
of the socialist party during the war to let the coun- 
try take care of itself. 

But without responsibility, we can have no ideal. 
A genuine purpose implies the will to realize that 
purpose. We shall always be individualists, let us 
hope ; we shall always be ready to stand for the ideal 
which to the best of our knowledge is the proper 
answer to our needs; we shall be true to our ideal 
even though public opinion disagree with us. It is 
only in the brutal state of nature that all animals of 
the same kind conform approximately to one pro- 
gram of conduct; when the mind is free, there will 
be differences of opinion and increasing differences 
of character, and there will be occasional martyrs. 
Unfortunately there are no martyrs in our democ- 
racy. Martyrdom is an art for which we have no 
longer the gift. We are willing to preach doctrines 
that get us into trouble, but we are not willing to 
abide by the consequences or to sustain the responsi- 
bilities of our preaching. At the beginning of our 
part in the war, two boys conected with my own 
university were arrested for attempting to print a 
pamphlet which advised opposition to the draft law. 
Under the guidance of counsel supposed to be ma- 
ture, and no doubt in conformity with their own 
impulses, they pleaded that they were indeed re- 
sponsible for the pamphlet, but that if they had not 
been arrested for another twenty-four hours they 
would have changed it so as not to commit a seditious 



DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 33 

act. A graduate of the university said to me shortly 
afterward that these young men were a disgrace to 
us. I agreed with him, but added that my reason for 
thinking them a disgrace to the university was per- 
haps not the same as his. If they had been genuinely 
opposed to the draft law, and had felt compelled to 
preach against it, and had maintained their position 
before the court, I should still have thought them in 
the wrong, and I should have felt that any self- 
respecting government must punish them, but I 
should not have thought their conduct disgraceful. 
If they came into a classroom in literature, might 
not the teacher be holding up for their admiratfon a 
Milton or a Thoreau or some other honored spirit 
who with no thought of shirking responsibility to 
the state, yet in some point felt obliged to stand out 
against the majority, and who was perhaps in error, 
yet was staunch to a sincere ideal? To waste the 
time of the community, however, by preaching a re- 
volt which you are not willing to suffer for, is to 
behave no more nobly than the naughty boys on the 
street comer, who try to annoy the policeman with- 
out getting caught. 



IV 

If it was difficult to know what our ideals were 
while the war was in progress, it is not easier to 
name them now that we must reorganize a badly 
shaken world. To some degree we all think in terms 
of former intellectual momentum, we say over again 
the phrases that once expressed genuine ideals but 



34 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

whioli have no reference now to our desires nor to 
our needs. When other nations fall into the same 
confusion we charge them with insincerity or with an 
excessive fondness for irresponsible oratory, forget- 
ting that the weakness is common to the human race. 
What we now must do, is to examine frankly our 
present needs, and to give our utmost energy to sat- 
isfying them. We shall find our ideals as soon as we 
see the things that cry to be cured. 

In our American life there has always been danger 
that we should not think of the country as a whole. 
Our territory is large ; it is easy for the sections of 
it to forget each other. Those racial elements also 
which here forget their past and join hands to make 
a new world and a new democracy, it is easy for 
them to fuse only in part, to unite only so far as 
seems necessary for political coherence, to reserve 
to themselves some racial inheritance which should 
become a national asset. Unfortunately we are not 
yet ready to make of the United States a melting- 
pot ; like other groups of men who talk much of unity 
while clinging to different ideals, we are willing to 
cast into the common treasury only those posses- 
sions we care least for. We were annoyed to discover 
that large groups of German-Americans dreamt of 
implanting throughout the land the seeds of an ex- 
clusively German culture. There are groups of 
American citizens of British descent who dream just 
as sincerely of educating this country in British ways 
of thought. Other groups with other inheritance 
have a similar ambition. A few evenings ago I was 
introduced to a young Yiddish poet, an American 
citizen, reported to hav^'much talent. I expressed 
to him my regret not to know his verses, since I 



DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS S5 

could not read Yiddish. ' ' You might leam Yiddish 
and read my poems," he remarked quite casually. 
I felt impelled to retort, ''You might learn English 
and read mine." Our true ideal is not to become 
the heir of any one race ; we who are of all peoples 
must become American. We are not ashamed, but 
proud, that the English we speak is American Eng- 
lish ; if we are to improve our speech it will not be by 
recovering a former purity, but by adding to what 
we already have the best that other languages can 
teach us. And our speech, so gathered and fused, 
will be the illustration of our whole culture. 

But just how are we to build up a national life? 
What are to be the items of our life in common? 
We cannot answer these questions until we have 
studied our common needs. This present volume is 
an essay toward such a study. In a general way, 
however, it is not impossible to forecast the method 
whereby the rich elements that pour in upon us 
may be seized and united in the spirit of our nation. 
We have but to remember that nationalism or patri- 
otism begins in the art of being a good neighbor. 
We owe it to the community in which we live to 
share its life; the community owes it to us that we 
should make our contribution to its life. We shall 
remain individuals; we shall continue to have our 
private affairs. But in the things that concern all 
men, — health, safety, education, art, — all men should 
act together. I know that the word "nationalism" 
has terrors for those who fear the crimes and tragic 
errors sometimes committed in the name of patriot- 
ism. But if one is to any extent a good neighbor, 
he will soon feel the urge of conscience toward larger 
responsibility than the township circumscribei ; ha 



36 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

will discover his duty toward the county, the state, 
the whole nation. If his imagination is sufficiently 
generous, he will discover the neighborly duties of 
his country toward other countries. In this sense 
he will become both national and international. He 
would belong not to one race but to the human race. 
At the same time he would belong not to all nations 
but to one nation. The difference is important. We 
Americans do not, and can not, believe that one 
race is necessarily and inherently superior to an- 
other. We ourselves are to be the component of all 
races. But our common interests will make us a 
nation, provided we begin, each in his community, 
to be good neighbors. Those well-meaning but shal- 
low dreamers who preach internationalism yet scorn 
nationalism, are really fascinated by the hope that 
a benevolent attitude toward mankind in general 
may relieve us from responsibility toward any hu- 
man being in particular. 

Of those ideals that concern us all, so long as we 
are good neighbors, education is the very first. We 
desire it for ourselves, and unless selfishness blinds 
us utterly, we will see that our neighbor has it too. 
Without a common education we can neither work 
together nor play together; and without universal 
education democracy is an unstable venture. Those 
who have knowledge are, as it were, to that extent 
in the secret of life, and they own the world. If 
all men are to own the world, we must all have knowl- 
edge. Our business belongs to us only if we under- 
stand it, otherwise it belongs to the manager or the 
bookkeeper or whoever directs it. The railroads 
belong to the people only if the people understand 
railroading — which of course they do not; and the 



DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 37 

railroads therefore belong to those who actually- 
direct them, whether or not the government is said 
to control them. We are on the point of realizing, 
perhaps, that social problems are intellectual and 
spiritual rather than economic. We begin to see the 
stupidity of keeping the bricklayer in ignorance of 
the plans of the building, and the bricklayer himself 
begins to be uneasy. The workingman in general 
begins to suspect that some secret, some power, is 
being kept from him unfairly ; for the most part he 
thinks the power must be money, and he therefore 
asks for higher wages, but straightway he finds him- 
self no better off, no less uneasy. Money is only the 
crudest form of the power we all seek. The work- 
man is already beginning to ask for complete knowl- 
edge of the business or craft to which his skill con- 
tributes; the bricklayer will lay bricks, but he will 
think like an architect. And the citizen, let us hope, 
will ask to be taught the whole business of his gov- 
ernment. Only in this way shall we have peace of 
mind or the barest political freedom; for until we 
share the knowledge that controls our lives, we shall 
continue to be directed by the same type of man that 
directs us now — that is, by the men who know more 
than we do. 

To be good neighbors and to study life together! 
This seemed to be for a moment at least the genuine 
ideal of the two million American citizens who made 
up our armies abroad. They ^poke in many lan- 
guages, but they were learning to speak and to un- 
derstand each other in one. They were of all origins, 
but they were feeling for a common future. On the 
soil of France the German blows were forging an 
American nation. Or so it seemed, at least. If the 



38 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

appearance should in the end prove an illusion, the 
war would indeed be for us, not a crusade ending 
in a spiritual rescue, but only a slaughter that filled 
up the world's graveyards. 



II 

AMERICAN CHARACTER 



At some time or other we all boast of the country 
to which we belong. The American is said to be 
extremely boastful. To understand him, however, 
it is well to observe that he boasts of his country, not 
of his race, and that he is quite aware of the differ- 
ence between the man who has a country and the 
man who belongs to a race, and that he believes the 
difference is in his favor. He knows better than to 
think of Americans as derived from a common stock, 
and he prefers not to think of them as conserving 
their virtues from their fathers. When he boasts 
of what his fellow-citizens are, or what they can do, 
he would express his faith that in origin they are 
but common men, but that being Americans they 
have had advantages. The raw material of the 
American character, he believes, is not the refine- 
ment of one blood nor the blend of many races, but 
the plain substance of buman nature ; and this raw 
material, he would say, is brought to perfection by 
a happy way of life, which usually he does not define 
beyond his conviction that there is in it much hope, 
many dreams, and little of the past. Twenty years 
ago, perhaps, this generalization would not have 

39 



40 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

been true; perhaps it will not hold for to-morrow; 
but if you would understand the Americans of the 
moment, the soldiers who made their appearance in 
the last act of the war, the citizen army in France 
and the citizen workers at home, who suddenly, al- 
most convulsively, realized themselves as a-» nation, 
you must begin by noting that they did not realize 
themselves as a race. 

You must begin with this fact because there the 
American begins to differ from the Englishman, and 
let me add, from the German. In his "Address to 
the Americans," Mr. Chesterton made a striking 
contrast between the American national ideal and 
the German. Germans, he said in effect, are all of 
one race but of many ra«iks ; Americans are of many 
races, but wish to be of one rank. He was obvi- 
ously opposing to that hope of democracy which 
human nature very generally entertains to-day, that 
other conception of one peculiar race, God-favored, 
against which human nature has very recently had 
to arm itself. But if we were to change Mr. Ches- 
terton's contrast so that it should carry no flavor 
of condemnation but simply a statement of the dif- 
ference between neighbors, the Americans would 
consider it proper to say that the English are of one 
race ; that they prize the traditions which can come 
only with race consciousness ; that they think better 
of the English-born simply because he is born of 
English blood ; that the typical American, if he were 
an Englishman — that is, if he had a race tradition 
— would naturally set a high value upon it, and would 
think favorably of a new acquaintance who could 
introduce himself as of the same inheritance; but 
that the American, having come from aU races, 



AMERICAN CHARACTER 41 

makes it a point of honor not to ask a newcomer 
of what race he is — ^makes it a point of honor to 
keep to himself, if he has it, or to suppress as far as 
possible, the sentiment for traditional things — for 
the family line, for the inherited language, even for 
the home in the sense of a fixed hearth. 

The reason for this American renunciation of race 
might seem to be primarily what is suggested in 
Mr. Chesterton's contrast, that we in the United 
States have come from the ends of the earth, and 
that in order to live together at all we are obliged 
to slip lightly over matters of divergence, and are 
therefore obliged to forget differences of origin, 
which form our chief divergence. Certainly there 
is some truth in this explanation. But it was not an 
American who first spoke of the United States as a 
'^melting pot," and to one who knows the country 
the phrase is not a true description. If it were, the 
race would begin after the melting is done. Such 
an enforced compromise as characterizes any so- 
ciety recruited from varied sources is but a tem- 
porary expedient, and if there were no other reason 
why Americans think of themselves merely as a 
country or nation, never as a race, we might expect 
this explanation to become invalid with time; we 
might expect that at least the children of those who 
so compromise would consider their way of life as 
at last settled and traditional, and their ideals as 
beginning to be racial. It does not appear, however, 
that any traditions are growing in the United States, 
nor does the promise of any show itself even at this 
moment when the idea of nationality has become 
with us, as with other people, a living force. 

The truth is, that if Americans were to let their 



42 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

minds dwell on their personal or family history, 
upon the places in which their family life began, 
our whole country would be aching with home-sick- 
ness. The end of most philosophies is to enable 
men to live happily with the facts that particularly 
affect them. We have evolved a philosophy which 
enables us to live cheerfully with the great Amer- 
ican fact that all of us have left the house, and 
most of us the city, where we were born. This is 
obviously true of the immigrant; it is equally true 
of the New Englanders who have moved West, of 
the Southerners who have moved North, and of the 
Westerners who have come to Eastern cities. The 
American man or woman who at the age of thirty is 
still living in the house in which he or she was bom 
is hard indeed to find. The average soldier in the 
French army to-day may easily have come from a 
family hearth which has burned continuously for a 
hundred or a hundred and fifty years. Of the Amer- 
ican army probably no more than two or three per 
cent were living at the time of their enlistment in 
the home of their birth. Their families have come 
recently from Europe or else they have moved about 
in the United States. The causes of this moving are 
interesting, but not for the moment important; the 
important thing is that when an American thinks 
of his country he does not think of the soil, nor of 
the homestead, nor of his inherited language, for to 
do so would be to cultivate retrospect and regret; 
rather he thinks of the ideals for which his country 
stands, of the future, of that world of affections in 
which he instinctively recognizes a career for him- 
self and a common meeting-place with his fellows. 
Is the American, then, an idealist? He certainly 



AMERICAN CHARACTER 4*3 

is so in the sense that he lives in the world of pros- 
pects and hopes. Therefore he is willing to rebuild 
his cities with that incessant tearing up of streets 
and remodeling of houses which to the European 
is a nightmare orgy of change. If he has a vision 
of any improvement which could be made in his 
boyhood home, and if he can find the means, the 
house is probably doomed. Only a few churches in 
America, and no other buildings, may be warranted 
safe against this passion for bringing the world up 
to date. Colleges and universities in the United 
States perhaps conserve more pious memories than 
any other kind of public institution, yet some of our 
large universities have transported themselves 
bodily to a new site, with the result that the alumni 
who return to venerate Alma Mater must thereafter 
do so strictly in the world of imagination, paying 
homage to an idea, since there remains on the cam- 
pus neither stick nor stone with power to recall a 
single minute of their youth. In these removals 
the motive is a true idealism, an imagining of the 
university in a large and eternal world, together 
with the will to realize the dream; the accomplish- 
ment, however, is perhaps a bit troubling, since a 
shrine abandoned will send its own petitions after 
the departing worshipers. 

The American habit of living in a world of pros- 
pects and hopes is still more troubling in an indi- 
vidual who happens to be provincial in culture. Not 
only will he seem lacking in the humane tradition, 
as indeed he will be lacking in it, but he will seem 
perhaps contemptuous of it to a degree which shocks 
or annoys the European. Of Americanism in this 
phase Dickens gave a portrait — of the apparently 



44 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

boastful, exaggerating, sliallow Americanism. Per- 
haps Dickens failed to understand the great effort 
by which citizens of the United States resolve not 
to think tenderly of the things they or their fathers 
have put behind them. Americans of British descent 
have loved Dickens for his portrait of the English 
life from which they have gone out ; yet even such 
Americans will rarely permit themselves to speak 
of Englishmen as their British cousins ahd never 
of England as their home. So the Italians in the 
States, or the immigrants of any other nationality, 
are careful not to speak of their Italian sky or*of 
the other particular heaven of their boyhood as 
though they still had a place under it ; such memories 
they cut off as completely as may be in order to 
share without reserve in the enterprise of the new 
world. Of course, since we elect to live in the future, 
we give the impression of a tendency to boast, but 
when we speak of the future we are discoursing upon 
the only part of our history which we all have in 
common. We are merely expressing with energy 
the dreams and the hopes which are the fabric of 
our present moment, and at times we are merely 
whistling for courage to walk on with so little guid- 
ance from the customs and habits of our fathers. 
It took courage to pull up by the roots a family in 
Denmark or in Italy or in Serbia, let us say, and 
to transplant it to a new world. Such a family set- 
tling in central Massachusetts, for example, must 
repeat several times the equivalent of the first up- 
rooting; since even though the family itself does 
not move, its neighbors will, and the Irish settler 
will be succeeded by the Polish until each original 
family is once more isolated among people of other 



AMERICAN CHARACTER 45 

backgrounds. Or if the family simply remains, the 
new generation will surround it with new traits. 
Many a novel is written on this theme in the United 
States to-day — stories of the Americanization of 
this family or that, where the Americanization con- 
sists largely of breaking away from the elder gen- 
eration and becoming proportionately optimistic. 
The change is usually effected by education; it is 
no wonder that the small schoolhouse is so often a 
shrine of gratitude — often a gratitude mingled with 
melancholy, for here the culture of the past has been 
used, not to recover the past, but to get free of it. 
To the foreigner, no matter how friendly, our harp- 
ing upon a brilliant future is perhaps, as we said, 
a form of boastfulness, but to the American it seems 
rather a form of prayer, a telling of beads, and 
we can hear in it, as in American music, a wistful 
note; we are conscious of caring too much about the 
future and too little about the past; we should like 
to know at any moment whether the frail structure 
of our dreams is settling down to some contact with 
some foundation, and whether we are at least walk- 
ing on our own feet on the ground. 

Our seeming optimism is most blatant when our 
culture is most defective, but even when the Amer- 
ican is at home in the older world he will prize it 
chiefly for its usefulness to him and his fellows, for 
bringing their dreams to earth. The crowds of 
Americans who toured Europe in the years before 
the war had little antiquarian or historical interest 
in what they saw. They looked upon European 
architecture only as seeing what they might use at 
home ; if the Coliseum reappeard in the Yale bowl, 
and the Gothic cathedrals were freshly translated 



46 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

into the Woolworth building, then those ancient 
monuments justified themselves. The old world be- 
longed to them, they thought — Westminster Abbey, 
for illustration, was to them as much American as 
English. We did not build it ; but then, neither did 
you. The people who built it are dead. The Abbey 
is the possession of those who revere it. The same 
point of view is the secret of Longfellow's charm 
for his countrymen, and perhaps for other readers 
as well. When he translated, or even when he gave 
his original self, he was conveying home for the 
American the usable parts of European literature. 
Here best is found an explanation of his currency 
even among those writers abroad who recognized 
how much he had copied from their national poetry ; 
for, accommodating the poems to the American peo- 
ple, he had substituted in them for the enjoyment 
of history the American wistfulness, and this sub- 
stitution gave him originality with the European 
reader. If we were to seek another example of 
the discrimination the American temperament 
makes even when it can appreciate the older culture, 
we might point to the contrast between our present 
neglect of Greek language and literature and our 
present great interest in Greek dancing. With us 
Greek language and literature have long been taught 
chiefly if not entirely as vehicles of a tradition. Even 
if we learned to read Greek, we saw no opportunity 
for doing anything with that difficult accomplish- 
ment. Greek dancing, however, gave us an oppor- 
tunity to dance. You may say if you choose that 
neither Athenian nor Spartan nor Theban ever 
danced as does the American who imitates the 
Greeks ; the average American, however, is by pref- 



AMERICAN CHARACTER 4)T 

erence without archeological conscience, and for 
him the choice is easy between the way he likes to 
dance and the way the Greeks may be thought to 
have liked to do so. 

To say that even the cultured American is inter- 
ested in culture only for what it will avail him to- 
morrow, that he does not permit himself the re- 
trospects of history ; to say that the average Amer- 
ican uproots himself from the place of his birth 
and of his boyhood, that he crushes down all race 
memories and boasts only of his future — ^to say this 
is, of course, to exaggerate. In certain parts of 
the United States, in Virginia and Massachusetts, 
for example, pride of race and pride of the hearth 
does from time to time become eloquent in the old 
families. Even those of us who were not born in 
those states enjoy and encourage such eloquence, as 
being a somewhat quaint exhibition of our national 
imagination; but at the same time our instinctive 
answer to this tendency is to make fun of it. Bos- 
ton is indeed a city of culture, but since Boston is 
aware of the fact, its culture is for other Amer- 
icans a theme of good-natured jest. This defense 
against an incipient pride of locality or pride of 
ancestry is not new with us ; we have always made 
it. Irving wrote his * ' History of Dietrich Knicker- 
bocker" as comment upon a serious history of the 
Dutch settlers in New York. Similarly David Ga- 
mut in Cooper's ''Last of the Mohicans," and Icha- 
bod Crane in Irving 's "Legend of Sleepy Hollow," 
are notable caricatures of the school teacher who 
already was becoming a boasted type in New Eng- 
land. What we might think of heredity, were we an 
older society, we do not know ; at present, however, 



48 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

we are inclmed to judge a man by his future — ^by 
the record his son is likely to make rather than by 
the record his father made. This is quite literally 
true; in small villages and in cities alike the son 
of a distinguished father is fatally handicapped if 
he shows any disposition to remember whose son 
he is, whereas the creditable performance of a ris- 
ing young man leads the neighbors to observe that 
he must have been well brought up. We might add 
that if the American lacks reverence for his elders, 
he is extremely attentive to children. 



n 

Even though this point of view may be exagge- 
rated, it explains many things which otherwise the 
foreigner must misunderstand in the American, or 
must, what is perhaps worse, entirely overlook in 
him. It explains, for example, the great difference 
between what an American means when he talks of 
liberty and what an Englishman or a Frenchman 
means by the same word. The European who de- 
sires liberty takes for granted at the same time a 
tradition which is itself a check upon too great free- 
dom ; in matters of art and conduct tradition enters 
his character as an endowment of taste. But when 
the American speaks of liberty he has no idea of 
any check placed by any tradition upon his desire 
to do as he pleases. Liberty, as he conceives of it, 
is an opportunity to experiment, and his freedom 
will in the end be limited only by the hard lesson 
which experience may enforce. It was not by acci- 



AMERICAN CHARACTER 49 

dent that the philosophy of pragmatism evolved it- 
self in the United States, that philosophy which rele- 
gates truth itself to an experiment, and in which, 
for all its cheerfulness, taste is at a discount. Per- 
haps it is something of a reason for distrusting 
pragmatism that it is the social expression of a 
nation which, from force of circumstances, has given 
up having a past, and to some extent has ceased to 
be guided by taste. 

Perhaps it may seem too severe a criticism of any 
people to charge them with a wholesale lack of taste. 
Yet taste involves always a sense of chronology, 
perhaps also a sense of geography ; and these senses 
are the result of a certain studious respect for what 
men have done before us, and for the particular 
ends to which by experience they learned to adapt 
particular needs. As yet the American fails some- 
what to reap this profit from the past. The tourist 
who sees some effect of Moorish architecture and on 
the same trip to Europe feels the charm of an Eng- 
lish cottage is not unlikely, provided he has the 
means, to incorporate his memory of both styles of 
architecture into his house at home. Some of our 
most exciting achievements in architecture have 
been so reached. We cannot argue with the per- 
petrator of these mixtures, since by his philosophy 
of life they are not mixtures after all, but simply 
quotations from one unique source, the past. Nor can 
we easily teach the young American to feel a nearer 
interest in Benjamin Franklin, let us say, than in 
Julius Caesar ; in either case he is overwhelmed with 
the misfortune the distinguished character suffers^ 
in being dead. To all Americans, old or young, the 
past is a great negation, the infinite gulf in which 



60 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

dead things are swallowed up, and in eternity all 
the dead of all the ages are contemporaries. There- 
fore if the builder of the village house mixes his 
Moorish and English architecture, he justifies him- 
self with the conviction that both styles were brought 
from Europe, and Europe is some place outside of 
America from which useful things can from time to 
time be resurrected. Similarly it is easy for the 
schoolboy, and indeed for the grown man in the 
United States, to refer quite indiscriminately to 
George Washington, to Homer, to David, and to 
Barnum in a juxtaposition which makes the Europe- 
an gasp ; for these men are alike dead, and the Amer- 
ican has carefully avoided that meticulous acquaint- 
ance with the past which makes one sensitive to 
chronology or to category. 

It is not the uneducated American of whom I am 
now speaking. The best illustration of this atti- 
tude toward the past is the poet-philosopher who 
perhaps ' is the most American of all our writers, 
R. W. Emerson. The English reviewers who found 
themselves somewhat bewildered by his indifference 
to chronology disposed of his early books with polite 
amazement or with contempt, according to their 
individual way of dealing with incomprehensible 
things. ''Life has no memory," they read in the 
great essay on "Experience," and in the first lovely 
book on ' ' Nature ' ' they were told that time is illu- 
sion, and in almost every page of Emerson they 
were taught that time is only a method of thought 
and that man is great as he emancipates himself 
from respect for other lands or other ages than 
his own. In almost every page they came upon lists 
of books or names of cities which seemed purposely 



AMERICAN CHARACTER 61 

disordered for an effect of humor; the inventories 
for which Walt Whitman has been assailed are only 
a moderate exaggeration of Emerson's. That Briton 
of common-sense and not too great imagination, 
Thomas Hughes, was moved to register his convic- 
tion that Emerson was a glittering impostor — much 
as a modern reader might accuse a clever man in our 
own day of catching the public ear with silly ec- 
centricities. But Emerson was singularly sincere 
and as far as possible from desiring to get attention 
by a trick. He was, however, American, and if we 
are to decide that indifference to the past is a weak- 
ness in the American character, then Emerson culti- 
vated that weakness with all his heart. When he 
substituted his conception of an oversoul for the 
orthodox conception of God, he wished to do more 
than change the name of his deity. He wished to 
conceive of the soul as breathed through by an eter- 
nal force, equally wise, equally loving in all ages. 
Provided this oversoul inspire us, there is no need 
for study or for previous experience. "The soul 
circumscribes all things," he said, "it predicts all 
experience, in like manner it subtends time and 
space." When we are inspired, we are great men; 
without that inspiration we are dead, though we 
know history ever so thoroughly. In other words, 
Emerson was conceiving of a God who should be a 
substitute for the past, and who would make a knowl- 
edge of the past unnecessary. Such a God the He- 
brew Jehovah was not. We must not seem to give 
the impression that the Americans of to-day who 
have the same point of view are necessarily follow- 
ers of Emerson ; many of them of course neglect to 
read him. But he is the true expression of his coun- 



m DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

try's temperament, and is likely to remain so for 
many a year. 

At Emerson's old home, Concord, a friend of 
mine recently found, in an American audience gath- 
ered to hear him lecture, a curious confirmation of 
the American detachment from the past. The idea 
of lecturing at Concord at the home of the philos- 
opher, of Hawthorne and of Thoreau, almost on 
the site of the little battle-field which had for the 
United States such momentous consequences, in- 
spired my friend to some such feeling of the past 
as a European would understand. When he faced 
his audience, however, he realized that most of them 
must have come to the United States since the Civil 
War, and that their interest in the old revolutionary 
skirmish and in the writers who once lived in the 
village was just about as immediate as their interest 
in Marathon or in the home of the obelisk-makers. 
My friend, telling me the story, said like a good 
American, *' After all, they are quite right. Why 
live in the past?" I do not know whether he real- 
ized how near he was to quoting Emerson himself — 
*'Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchers 
of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and 
criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God 
and Nature face to face; we, through their eyes. 
Wliy should not we also enjoy an original relation 
to the universe? . . . Why should we grope among 
the dry bones of the past, or put the living genera- 
tion into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? 
The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and 
flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, 
new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and 
laws and worship." The American boys called to 



AMERICAN CHARACTER 53 

France in our armies were few of them studious 
readers of Emerson, but most of them were of his 
school of thought. It was only for the sake of the 
future, after all, that they willingly engaged so 
deeply in what seemed to them the tragic result of 
a long past. Finding themselves hailed by friendly 
English comrades as cousins in blood, they learned 
as quickly as possible to conceal their astonishment ; 
to many of them the remark was merely a compul- 
sion to think for the first time of the stock from 
which they came — usually not an Anglo-Saxon 
stock. Arriving in France, they found themselves 
greeted with an extraordinary gratitude which im- 
plied something done in the past of which they were 
not aware. Upon inquiry they found that they were 
received as America's gift in return for Lafayette. 
Many of them, with the best disposition to be om 
courcmt, asked at once, Who was Lafayette I Some 
of them must have been disappointed to know that 
he died so long ago. All of them were reaUy more 
interested in Marshal Foch. 

The American philosophy which I have been here 
setting forth may explain also the American atti- 
tude toward the Germans, which in some respects 
differs slightly from the French or the British atti- 
tude. Even if Germany had not forced the United 
States to fight, the demonstration which Germans 
gave us in the United States that they had not af- 
ter all abandoned their own past, would have 
been a matter of concern for all Americans con- 
scious of their own philosophy. We had looked upon 
the Germans, cherishing in our midst their love of 
old customs, much as we looked upon the Scotch in 
various communities, as eminently loyal citizens of 



54 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

the new world, who yet affectionately retained an 
antiquarian interest in the country of their origin. 
We found a certain quaintness in their memory of 
the old country, simply because the American so 
rarely exhibits any memory at all of the past; we 
did not suspect that tradition among the Germans 
was a thing more real than among those Massachu- 
setts or Virginia families of which I have spoken, 
where a good-humored fashion makes something of 
the ancestors of the house. The early years of the 
war showed us, however, that the Germans had never 
given up their past, that they therefore had never 
become one with the other Americans, and that they 
had no share in our future. If the other racial ele- 
ments which have come to our shores should disclose 
a similar tendency in moments of stress, our great 
experiment in the new world would be obviously a 
failure. We feel that the war has proved, for all 
other racial elements except the Germans, that the 
experiment is not a failure; as for the Germans, 
it has proved, we think, that some of them can 
have no part with us, and that those of them who 
are American at heart must drop their past alto- 
gether. 



in 

Any study of American character to-day which 
would arrive at the truth must, I think, face frankly, 
as I here have tried to do, th^ extent to which the 
citizen of the United States, at least in the present 
generation, lives without a sense of the past. What 
America may become is perhaps suggested by the 



AMERICAN CHARACTER 55 

consciousness which most thoughtful Americans be- 
gin to have of the shortcomings in the national 
character — the shortcomings which result from this 
exclusive emphasis upon the future. More than any 
other nation that has played an important role in 
the world, we are without a sense of the soil; we 
quite literally live in a world of ideas, we quite liter- 
ally get along somehow without a practical reckon- 
ing of time and space. We have developed a top- 
heavy way of life. When we speak of the home, 
since we have no sense of the local hearth as a 
Frenchman has, nor of the place from which our 
ancestors came as the British colonist has, we are 
forced to think of the world of ideas which are in- 
cluded in a household. The people for whom we 
have the household affection make up all that we 
know of home. To take this attitude toward life 
may be indeed to take an ideal attitude, but we be- 
gin to have among us here and there certain lonely 
philosophers, Professor George Santayana for ex- 
ample, who remind us that ideals must have roots 
in natural facts, and that to live merely in sentiments 
and affections is to follow a thin and perhaps a dan- 
gerous kind of existence. We wonder from time to 
time how long it will be before the readjustment 
which at present seems continuously needed in the 
United States will bring us to some point of stabil- 
ity, where our affections may begin to attach them- 
selves to quite earthly and natural shrines. 

If the United States were really a melting-pot, we 
should expect our people, coming as they do from 
all races, to represent as it were the sum total of 
what all races might contribute to the common wealth 
of humanity. We might expect, therefore, to find 



56 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

in the United States much art, fine science, and a 
noble poetry. That has indeed been the expectation 
of optimistic Americans, and the expectation has 
furnished the text for much comment from critical 
foreigners, who upon visiting our shores have mar- 
veled, perhaps with an inward satisfaction after 
all, that a country so new and supposedly full of 
energy should have as yet disclosed so meager an 
utterance in things of the spirit. The fact is, how- 
ever, that a nation which has dropped its past has 
thereby dropped the instruments of expression. 
Language is but a series of sounds, mere groans and 
noises if you choose, until the ear has grown accus- 
tomed after many centuries to detect the significant 
shades and intonations of the specific groan. No 
language can be improvised, if the audience is to 
understand the speaker. The larger fabric of lan- 
guage, the racial memories to which an old country 
can always appeal, obviously do not exist in a land 
where every man is busy forgetting his past, separ- 
ating himself from the memory of what his fore- 
fathers felt and said. "Without tradition there can 
be no taste, and what is worse, there can be little 
for taste to act upon. We have indeed some ap- 
proaches, some faint hints and suggestions of a na- 
tional poetry. The cartoon figure of Uncle Sam, 
for example, a great poet could perhaps push over 
into the world of art, but unless the poet soon ar- 
rives there will be few Americans left who can rec- 
ognize in that gaunt figure the first Yankee, the 
keen, witty, audacious, and slightly melancholy type 
of our countrymen as they first emerged in world 
history. 

From among all our great men for the last two 



AMERICAN CHARACTER 57 

hundred years, of whom can we write a story 
or a poem with any expectation that the reader 
has heard of the man before — or, to be more gener- 
ous toward the reader, with any expectation that, 
having heard of the man, he knows anything in par- 
ticular about him? Benjamin Frantlin, Thomas 
Jefferson, Daniel Boone, are names indeed but little 
more, to the American whose father reached the 
United States since 1864. George Washington is 
connected in some dim way with the story of a 
cherry tree, but his hatchet activity begins to be 
mixed up in the national memory with the fact that 
Lincoln is said to have split rails. Lincoln himself 
is the only national figure who seems eligible for 
literary uses, but it sometimes seems that for many 
of us he is only the representative in later costume 
of the cartoon figure of Uncle Sam. The attempts 
which poets have made and are making in the United 
States to begin a national literature are among the 
most interesting and pathetic in the history of art 
— pathetic because few of them remember what must 
precede art, a good store of legend or history which 
the poet can draw upon and turn to emotional value. 
To speak of Trafalgar or of Blenheim to an Eng- 
lishman is to stir an emotion already prepared", but 
in America to speak of the ''Merrimac" and the 
''Monitor," or of Vicksburg or of Valley Forge is 
simply to stir memories of the schoolroom in which 
the children of the newcomer tried to remember 
many facts of like importance and alike removed 
from his interest, since they all were imbedded in 
a past, whether of Egypt or of England or of his 
own country. We have thought that the present 
war might indeed mark the beginning of such na- 



68 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

tional memories as would make for us a national 
art. 

Yet that hope may be frustrated ; for we dreamed 
of such a beginning after the Civil War, and 
for a while Northerner and Southerner could 
understand any reference to Stonewall Jackson or 
Eobert Lee, and in New England even at the end 
of the nineteenth century most citizens could ap- 
preciate the wonderful monument which St. Gau- 
dens made of Eobert Gould Shaw. To-day, how- 
ever, so many Bostonians happen to have been born 
in Italy that the figure of the young officer riding 
with his negro regiment is likely to suggest almost 
anything except a common tradition. So far as 
art is concerned, our task in America is to make 
the country a true melting-pot, to turn into a com- 
mon heritage something of what each race brings 
to us of race memory and of race aptitude for beau- 
tiful things. We are disturbed to observe that the 
Italian who arrives among us with a fresh and ap- 
parently inexhaustible passion for color and design 
becomes in the second generation a mere American, 
as poor in language as the rest of us ; that in time 
the musio-loving Russian forgets his gift, and that 
our own native Indian dies rapidly, leaving in our 
culture no trace of his extraordinary sense of rhythm 
and color and design. All of us, in conceding some- 
thing for the sake of a common understanding, have 
conceded so much that we have little left in com- 
mon to understand. 

If our lack of a past handicaps us in the matter 
of art, it handicaps us also in manners, since man- 
ners are themselves an art. Those societies which 
have a traditional behavior have manners; other 



AMERICAN CHARACTER 59 

societies must improvise their behavior as they go 
along. If the American seems impromptu in "his 
ways, it is really remarkable that he does not seem 
even more so, since outside of the individual home 
or the particular part of the given city in which he 
may reside he is subject to no formulas of behavior, 
and if he has manners he is likely to suggest to his 
countrymen that he is imitating the foreigner. You 
may talk or walk or may conduct a drawing-room 
conversation in an English way, in a French way, 
in an Italian way, or in a German way ; but it would 
be a bold critic who, after knowing America, would 
say just what is the American way of doing these 
things, since Americans on the whole do those and 
other things each as he pleases. There may seem 
at first sight little reason to object to a spontaneity 
of manner which has managed to slough off much 
impedimenta and to have brought to the fore in- 
stinctive friendliness and unveiled sincerity. But 
there are other uses of behavior than merely to 
seem amiable ; manners become at times vitally sig- 
nificant as language, and it is difficult indeed to 
speak with manners as with any other form of dis- 
course unless the hearer is conversant with the par- 
ticular tongue. In manners then, as in art, the oc- 
casional American who cares thoughtfully for his 
country's future, is at this moment considering by 
what means we may conserve the total contribution 
of all the races that come to us in one blended 
language which all of us may speak and under- 
stand. 

Aside from the field of art, one might expect that 
a country which starts fresh, which stands on its 
own feet, which considers every man equal to every 



60 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

other provided lie is honest and sincere and loyal 
to his neighbor, which reminds itself frequently that 
the world began when each one of us was born — ^it 
might be expected that such a country would achieve 
something clear and original in philosophy. Are not 
the old countries too much encumbered with prob- 
lems raised by the fume of dialectic controversy? 
Would not a group of men beginning with the ma- 
turity of manhood and yet with the unembarrassed 
vision of children, see life at least somewhat as it 
is? This has indeed been our American hope, and 
our most characteristic philosopher has held it 
out to us as an ideal, lending much transcendental 
color to the argument. Professor Santayana, in our 
own day, the most subtle of our philosophers, has 
preached it with infinite charm and persuasion. Yet 
a critic of life so astute as Professor Santayana ob- 
serves that the citizen of the United States is rather 
far from seeing life as it is; in fact, he is so busy 
making himself agreeable to his neighbors by dis- 
carding traditional prejudices, and incidentally per- 
haps, traditional inspirations, that his last state is 
not one of clear vision but of a vague, diffused feel- 
ing. He is not preeminently an admirer of intelli- 
gence. He is in love with morality, which he inter- 
prets as a high state of feeling rather than as a 
considered course of conduct. There is here a dif- 
ference between the moral sense of England and 
that of the United States; in England, if one may 
judge by the record of a long line of poets and prose 
writers, it is less in a man's favor that he should be 
intelligent than that he should be good, but in the 
United States it seems less in a man's favor that he 
should act well than that he should feel strongly 



AMERICAN CHARACTER 61 

about good conduct or that others should feel 
strongly about his conduct. We reduce as many 
of our problems as possible to this kind of moral 
question. Our political contests frequently resolve 
into a debate as to whether the candidate is or is 
not a good man, and the party which rises to the 
highest temperature of emotion wins — all this with- 
out much regard for the particular problem which 
the good man who is felt to be good by a majority 
of his countrymen will thereafter be called upon to 
solve. Perhaps this extraordinary expression of 
feeling in matters of moral concern is an exhibition 
of racial sentiment otherwise repressed. Is the idea 
too fantastic? Man's heart must rest on something 
solid, and the Decalogue will serve as a floating 
island in the world of ideas until we come to a 
broader and more firmly anchored territory. 

The tendency to set character above everything 
else, this sentimentality if I may call it so frankly, 
is not peculiar to any one race-strain in the total 
American complex ; it characterizes all of us. "Walt 
Whitman was truly American in his expression of 
diffuse and indiscriminate amiability. William 
James is truly American in putting an optimistic 
mood at the service of all his countrymen — an amia- 
ble project for a modem philosopher to devote him- 
self to. It was a typical American who recently 
wrote to a serious journal in the United States com- 
plaining of the education given in our colleges that 
it was too exclusively devoted to the training of 
the mind. Among all the faults attributable to our 
educational system, this special charge, that we 
trained the mind, we surely did not expect to hear. 
The danger of too great amiability is not merely 



62 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

that in the world of intelligence it makes ns blind 
to i^hose problems which can be solved only by in- 
telligence, problems of pure mechanics or of pure 
physics or of economics, but that even in the world 
of emotion it ends at last by depriving us of stand- 
ards, so that once we feel kindly toward the conduct 
and ideas of other men, we shortly are well-disposed 
to their feelings also. If it took a long time for the 
United States to orient itself in this world war, 
the cause should perhaps be sought not only in our 
detachment from European affairs but more pro- 
foundly in our lack of common standards by which 
to judge conduct of any sort. The service of the 
war to us may prove in the end to be chiefly this, 
that we have limited decidedly the area of experi- 
ence in which we are willing to measure things solely 
by an amiable disposition. 

A foreigner expects of the American not only a 
new art and a new intelligence, but also great 
energy, great genius for machinery, and a faculty 
for organization. Even if he fails to discover the 
art and the intelligence, he usually decides that the 
American indeed has the mechanical or the organ- 
izing gift. The American, himself, however, is rather 
surprised at this verdict. Why should he be 
praised for his machines? The fact is that he sets 
little store by them, and merely wonders in his turn 
why the foreigner does not avail himself of the same 
simple aids toward comfort. Much as the American 
has been accused of loving luxury, he really does not 
value merely comfortable or useful things, but in a 
world where it is easy to have comfort he wonders 
what great virtue there would be in going with- 
out it. 



AMERICAN CHARACTER 63 

Grave danger there is in machinery, as the 
American is aware; he knows that society has not 
yet found the right adjustment of machinery to 
human comfort and leisure; he knows that we may 
become slaves in some degree to the instruments 
we created for our convenience; but he also knows 
that this peril is not peculiarly American. The dif- 
ference between him and the European, as he sees 
it, is that the European fears to use any machinery, 
and he does not. He fears no loss in human dignity 
if he substitutes a mechanical street-sweeper for a 
row of laboring men. It seems to him that if the 
machine can clear away the mud, then sweeping the 
streets is no fit work for a man. He cannot see that 
the invention and the use of machines is any great 
credit to him nor any sign, as the foreigner so often 
interprets it to be, that his heart is set on material 
things. He cares little for money, though he hap- 
pens to live in a fortunate land where money is 
comparatively easy to win. It is on this subject that 
he is most sensitive so far as Europe is concerned, 
since the foreigner who gives him lectures on his 
too feverish pursuit of gold has in many cases come 
to America to make money by the lecture. At least 
by his own account the foreigner does not come out 
of admiration of American art or of American 
science. 

The American wonders also why Europe does 
not recognize his extraordinary preoccupation 
with ideas. His wars have been fought for ideas'^ 
his universities are debating grounds of new ideas^, 
he rebuilds his cities at great inconvenience in or- 
der to carry out his latest idea, and he will exchange 
all the gold he has for any idea which almost any 



64! DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

European brings him. The latest success in French 
philosophy or British thought, the newly risen artist 
on the European stage, is likely to find his first and 
largest audience in the United States, and the puz- 
zled American when he reads an English criticism 
of the low state of our intellectual life, frequently 
wonders whether British idealism has reached such 
perfection that it would not notice the difference 
if all the American purchasers of British books and 
patrons of British art were to withdraw their sup- 
port. He is puzzled at the greeting accorded by the 
foreign press when he invests all the money he has 
in some ancient and priceless work of art. What 
better use could he put money to than to buy with 
it the lovely tapestry, the Rubens, or the DaVinci 
which he admires? To his great surprise he is ac- 
cused of robbing British art if he buys a Rubens, or 
British literature if he is willing to pay more thanl 
anyone else for a manuscript of Burns. He would be 
accused of robbing French art if he managed to 
purchase the Venus de Milo. The two questions that 
perplex him are, first, why a portrait of Rubens 
or of Rembrandt should be more British than Aoner- 
ican art, and second, why he should be thought to 
have done something ignoble if he pays more for 
the manuscript of a British poet than any British 
citizen is willing to pay I What Americans really 
think about art, to what their hearts are really given 
in this world as between material accomplishment 
and the things of the spirit, cannot yet be judged 
by their own product in art or in literature or even 
in science, for our nation by forgetting its past has 
temporarily sacrificed the ability to accomplish 
great things in the world of expression. But if we 



AMERICAN CHARACTER GSi 

have thrown overboard our past, it has been in order 
to make the greatest of all experiments in human 
brotherhood. Where we do set our scale of values 
and where we shall set them when we once have a 
common background out of which to make a great 
art of our own, has been witnessed for a long time 
in the shrines to European poets which American 
subscriptions have helped to set up, in the monu- 
ments to great artists, and in the pilgrimages to 
those shrines which not only rich Americans have 
yearly made, but all of us who could by any sacri- 
fice find the means to travel. 



IV 

In such times as these when wise men scrutinize 
with rigor even the things they love best, it would 
not be profitable for an American, writing either 
for his countrymen or for the foreign reader, to 
praise his own country much. Yet I suppose the 
last mystery in the American character which should 
be exposed to the foreigner is the reason why Amer- 
icans, having so little tradition, do after all love 
their country. What began with us as a necessity 
has become a conviction and a hope — our faith that 
it is possible for man to begin again and to win an 
unprejudiced future. We believe that the men who 
arrive by the thousands from older shores to be our 
comrades may, in changing from the discipline of 
Europe to the freedom of our land, succeed in a 
new statement of human perfection. This has long 
been our hope; it was expressed for us in many a 



m DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

great sentence of Lincoln's, in many a stirring line 
of Whitman's, and in many a paragraph of Emer- 
son's. "Every spirit builds itself a house; and be- 
yond its house a world; and beyond its world a 
heaven. Know then, that the world exists for you. 
For you is the phenomenon perfect. What we are, 
that only can we see. All that Adam had, all that 
Caesar could, you have and can do. Adam called 
his house heaven and earth ; Caesar called his house 
Rome; you perhaps call yours a cobbler's trade, a 
hundred acres of plowed land, or a scholar's garret. 
Yet line for line and point for point, your domain 
is as great as theirs, though without fine names. 
Build, therefore, your own world." If you were 
to stand at the dock and read such words as these 
to each shipload of immigrants, you would merely 
be putting into language the hope that brings them. 
If you were to r«ad these words to their children 
and to their grandchildren, you would still be ex- 
pressing what they have come to love in the United 
States, and what they believe can best be achieved 
there. 

Meanwhile our task is to make a common past of 
our own — not so much of the past, we hope, as to 
shackle us again, but just enough of the past to talk 
with, to give us a language for art, for poetry, to 
give us a proper vehicle for our emotions. We 
would relate our idealism at last to the facts beneath 
our feet. We would have a philosophy which begins 
in a clear understanding of the world around us, 
and finds in that world intelligent means to reach 
ideal ends. We believe that by education the vast 
majority of men can be made capable of this devel- 
opment. Our faith has been immensely strength- 



AMERICAN CHARACTER 67 

ened by wliat we have seen in our Army in Europe, 
regiment upon regiment of all races and all lan- 
guages, yet all American and loyal. Loyal to what? 
To their ideal of a country where race does not 
count. They will go home, we believe, with discrimi- 
nating admiration for what they have seen of the 
great qualities of their allies. They have been at 
school. They have had a glimpse of that interna- 
tional sphere in which the nations will some day 
practice unselfishness. But it is not ILkely that they 
will carry back much love for the past — only indeed 
for the beautiful things out of the past, the things 
of art which we have always loved in the United 
States, and which seem to belong not to time at all. 



Ill 

FRENCH IDEALS AND AMERICAN 



In France we have caught reflections of our char- 
acter in the opinions which the Frenchman from 
time to time lets slip in his familiar talk. Since 
these opinions show the speaker's character also, 
we are prompted to use them for a comparison of 
the two nations, of their accomplishments and of 
their ideals. The average American who would un- 
derstand France may best begin with a comparison 
of ideals, for he will find it hard to believe that by 
his standards the French have accomplished much, 
nor from his point of view are they an active or 
an energetic people, nor apparently do they wish 
to be. He will admit that in moments of extreme 
peril they have improvised a kind of desperate ef- 
ficiency, at Valmy in 1792, at the Mame in 1914, but 
he will think these moments exceptional. If, how- 
ever, the American begins by asking what France 
wishes to do, what is her object in life, the inquiry 
is likely to disclose some weakness, or at least some 
doubtful areas, in the program of his own ideals. 
It will then be easier for him perhaps to understand 
how marvelous is the accomplishment of France, 
measured in terms of the French spirit. 

68 



FRENCH IDEALS AND AMERICAN 69 

In material achievement France and tlie United 
States differ greatly, but in our ideals we at least 
have the appearance of agreement ; certain formulas 
of our hopes and of our faith are spread like plati- 
tudes over the daily speech of both nations. If you 
should ask an American audience, for example^ 
whether the mind is more than the body, whether 
what a man is should count for more than what he 
has, the American audience would say yes — espe- 
cially on Sunday. Should you ask a French audience 
the same question, they would give the same answer, 
but they would wonder why you asked; they woiild 
also wonder why the American is so given to saying 
over these phrases of idealism, yet so slow to act 
upon them. Long ago the French made it the prin- 
ciple of their national life that spiritual things should 
be valued above material, that a man's riches should 
be looked for in his character. We live by no such 
principle, however we may have flattered ourselves, 
and in France, of all countries, under the scrutiny 
of friends who like ourselves are taking inventory 
of national ideals, we are most certain to learn how 
widely our practice varies from our talk. 

Before America entered the war the French gen- 
eral public thought of us as a nation of millionaires 
with a rather commercial interest in life. After we 
decided to take the side of the Allies, the average 
Frenchman continued to think of us as millionaires, 
but he realized that our chief interest in life could 
not be mercenary since we had cast our lot on a 
costly if not a losing side ; in fact, he began to see 
in us, as he generously said, idealists fighting for 
an abstraction, not for material gain, and our cross^ 
ing of the Atlantic he spoke of as a crusade. Eegi- 



70 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

ment after regiment of crusaders arrived on French 
soil, prayed for, waited for, and beautifully wel- 
comed with curiosity of spirit as well as with open 
arms ; every French citizen who understood English 
was alert for the first precious words to fall from 
the lips of the new-found idealists. What did fall 
from those lips has become almost a commonplace, 
it fell so uniformly — "What funny little locomo- 
tives!" "What a queer sound the whistle makes!" 
"How odd, they have no plumbing!" "Why doesn't 
the elevator work!" These were our instinctive and 
unconsidered first comments upon France. Said one 
astonished native, "If you really speak first of ma- 
chinery, if that is your involuntary thought and your 
nearest interest in life, perhaps you are fighting on 
the wrong side ; in machinery it is the Germans who 
excel. ' ' 

Of course we answer that Americans are not 
interested chiefly in machines, that we have eyes 
for beauty, for the French landscape, for the memo- 
rials of time and for the modem art that every- 
where enrich French civilization, that we have quick 
sympathy for the heroism which ennobled France in 
the great war; but the fact remains that we do not 
as a rule speak of these things, that in practice our 
idealism does not find spontaneous expression. Is 
it only that we are as yet a people of limited speech, 
still without a medium for the generous emotions 
we believe are ours ? In that case, how odd that we 
should be in France, where the human spirit for 
centuries has known how to utter itself! Or is it 
'that before the war we were driving unconsciously 
into that same admiration for purely creature com- 
forts and that same trust in mechanical substitutes 



FRENCH IDEALS AND AMERICAN 71 

for character which perverted modern Germany? 
The Frenchman is quite aware that his armchairs 
are less comfortable than ours, that his elevators are 
less practical, and that his street cars are smaller; 
but in explanation he reminds you that his chief 
effort hitherto has been toward spiritual things, and 
he knows quite as well as we that whereas one must 
travel to America or to Germany to enjoy perfection 
of machinery, it is to France one must go for art, 
for scholarship, and for civilization. 

True to this central principle, that the mind rather 
than the body is precious, the French are more care- 
ful in spiritual things than in physical. To give a 
common illustration, many An:ierican soldiers have 
wondered at the frankness of the French, man, 
woman or child, in matters — shall we say of phys- 
ical hygiene? But the American may not have no- 
ticed how far the Frenchman excels him in spiritual 
delicacy. We are modest about our bodies, the 
French are modest about their minds. Nakedness 
and a frank acceptance of physical fact astonish the 
Frenchman far less than the American, but on the 
other hand the Frenchman will not slap your shoul- 
der when he first makes your acquaintance, he will 
not at once call you by your first name, nor ask you 
to address him by his ; he will normally be cautious 
about inviting a new acquaintance into his home. If 
the American casually decides that the Frenchman 
is not fastidious, it might surprise liim to know that 
the Frenchman is shocked at the wholesale indeli- 
cacy of our manners, which make little distinction 
between those friends who are precious to us and 
those acquaintances whom we have barely met. 
Friendship in France, like every other communion 



72 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

of spirit, is a delicate relation, and there is a kind 
of art in cherishing it. This art we Americans have 
not greatly cultivated ; in France it has often seemed 
that we hardly have eyes to recognize it, not even 
in its loveliest forms. 

The ideal of spiritual modesty is illustrated by 
the way the French plan their homes. On the street 
you will find a somewhat severe, if not forbidding, 
wall; in the house you will come first on some of- 
fices or servants' quarters, and even on the kitchen, 
but as you penetrate the building you arrive at a 
court or a garden, and around the court will be the 
family rooms, the household shrine. The French- 
man knows that, even from a practical point of view, 
Such an arrangement is the most convenient. But 
his reasons for so ordering his house is that he 
wishes to give the greatest privacy to the things 
which seem to him most precious. If he has read 
at all of our habits in the United States, he knows 
that we follow the contrary principle, placing on the 
street those rooms which are for the graces of life, 
and giving the screen of privacy to the kitchen, to 
the pantry and to the serving quarters. Here and 
there in France the astonished citizen has heard tid- 
ings that in the small New England town, where the 
bay-window of the house is exposed to the public 
gaze, the proud family will place their group of 
Eogers statuary on a pedestal in the window and 
will pull back the curtains. Amiable as this atti- 
tude is toward the the curiosity of neighbors, the 
Frenchman wonders why we do not put our works 
of art on the sidewalk and have done with it. 



FRENCH IDEALS AND AMERICAN 73 



n ■ 

To praise the French home at the expense of the 
American may seem a straying far afield ; for some 
of us think that no race prizes the home as we do, 
and many have understood that in French life the 
home counts for little, and all of us have heard it 
said that in the French language there is no word 
for home. It is true of course that the French atti- 
tude toward the home differs from the English, as 
the English in turn differs from the American, but 
a competent comparison of the three attitudes will 
not at all be to the disadvantage of the French. 
Certainly as between the Americans and the French, 
we are in no position to say that the French under- 
estimate the home. They have always had a satis- 
factory way of naming it. Before the war they 
called it la maison, the house, and to be at home 
was to be chez soi, in one's own house. During the 
war, however, the word foyer, hearth, a literary 
word, has lost something of its bookishness and has 
crept into the talk of the French soldier, perhaps 
because these years have reminded him of what his 
home peculiarly means. It means in the old Latin 
sense, a hearth — a definite fire-place, where the 
household flame burns continuously from generation 
to generation, and where the hopes and the sorrows 
of the family are prayed for, or discussed, or suf- 
fered, from father to son. Especially the French 
home is a place where the family is born. We Amer- 
icans retain enough of the old world tradition to 
wish for our dead a definite and consecrated bury- 



74 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

ing-place; at that end, at least, our lives toucli the 
soil. 

But to the old Latin spirit, to the Frenchman, 
if he should express his frank opinion, a people who 
touch the soil only in the graveyard are not more 
than half decent, and their decency is much delayed. 
What should we think of a people who took no care | 
to mark the place where their dead lie ! The French- 
man has the same opinion of those who take no 
thought where their children come to birth. For 
him, the home ought to be as definitely the place 
where people are born as the churchyard is the place 
where they are buried, and he feels as strongly a 
pious sentiment for the room where his race first 
saw the light, as for the spot where each ancestor 
closed his eyes. In the French Army the average 
soldier comes from a hearth where he, his father, 
his grandfather and his great grandfather were 
born. Many soldiers come from homes of a much 
lengthier tradition, but the average reaches back at 
least so far. In the American Army in France by 
actual experiment, it was found that only two or 
three per cent of the soldiers were living at the time 
of their enlistment in the house where they were 
born — not to make any reckoning of their fathers 
and grandfathers. One Frenchman was heard to 
remark, ' ^ It is you Americans who have no word for 
home in your language; I hear you say in Paris, 
* Let's go home to the hotel' — that word home means, 
I judge, the last place you left your baggage. How 
do you say in American, 'Let's go back to the house 
where I was born, my father, my grandfather, and 
my great-grandfather?' " To this question the 
American is tempted to retort that he loves his 



FRENCH IDEALS AND AMERICAN 75 

home as dearly as other people, that the American 
home has special virtues of which he is peculiarly- 
proud, and that he has frequently been homesick — 
which implies that the home is for him something 
more than the last place he left his baggage. But 
even as he makes the retort he will realize that for 
us, necessarily moving about as most Americans 
have moved in our new and not quite settled country, 
we have defined the home as the group of people, 
the family ; we have attached our affections to a hu- 
man relationship exclusively, and we have taught 
ourselves to depart lightly from the actual soil on 
which our hearth was once founded, and from the 
garden or the fields in which our childhood was 
passed. 

When the Englishman speaks of home he means 
England, though he means also of course his 
family circle, and perhaps the particular hearth 
beside which the family circle may still live. When 
the American speaks of home he means his family 
circle, without much reference to its location. When 
the Frenchman speaks of his hearth he means also 
of course his family circle, but more profoundly he 
means the family altar and the actual ground made 
sacred to his primitive and enduring piety by the 
lives of his ancestors which have been begun and 
ended there. 

This attitude of the French toward the location of 
the home is the clue to their patriotism and to their 
religion. Their gods are found in the soil of France 
— the soil, not as a figure of speech, but as the actu- 
al earth which they have worked with their own 
hands. France may be reckoned an agricultural 
nation, but the difference between the agriculture 



76 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

of Burgundy or of tlie Midi and the agriculture of 
Wisconsin, let us say, or of Minnesota, is so great 
that it is really a mistake to try to express both by 
one word. The French farmer raises his crops, but 
his labor has another end than the production of 
food. His toil is an ancient cult, the full sentiment 
of which he feels at every stage of his work. No 
wonder he is reluctant to let machinery, no matter 
how efficient, come between him and the earth, in 
which, when he labors by primitive means, he can 
almost fancy he touches hands with his fathers. 
He lives close to nature in the poetic sense that he 
is conscious of the dramatic vicissitudes of weather, 
of the large element of chance in sunshine and rain ; 
with the oldest of faiths he recognizes dependence 
on dim gods, to whom the fields and the weather and 
the human family belong. Whatever religious de- 
bates take place in France, the essential religion of 
the French is not abstract. The French atheist has 
it as profoundly as the Protestant or the Roman 
Catholic; it is his feeling that the earth is kind and 
motherly, that life is a perpetual miracle springing 
from the actual soil, and that to live close to the soil 
and exposed to the weather, which seems to vitalize 
that soil, is to take part in the perpetual sacrament 
of existence. Sharing this sentiment, he is near that 
antique vision of life which worshiped Demeter 
and Bacchus, and indeed these gods, though they 
now may be unnamed, are still realized instinctively 
in the French heart. What the Frenchman will do 
with his life, therefore, or what kind of work he will 
devote himself to, cannot be determined entirely by 
economic considerations. He may prefer, for ex- 
ample, to make wine rather than beer, since beer is 



FRENCH IDEAI.S AND AMERICAN 77 

a manufactured thing, independent of weather and 
the seasons, whereas the vine really is France — a 
thing of religion, a cult, the product of prayers, of 
a beneficent heaven, and of a fruitful earth. 

This national interpretation of the soil can be il- 
lustrated from many a French book. Rostand's 
"Chantecler" is a modern instance. To the French 
critic this phantasy remains a somewhat unsuccess- 
ful tour de force; he will tell you that the costuming 
of the actors as barnyard fowls made the piece im- 
possible to present, and he will point out shallow- 
ness in the sentiment and lapses of taste in the dia- 
logue. But the foreigner can find in ^'Chantecler" 
an embodiment of the good sense, the courage and 
the idealism of the French, qualities which the war 
has brought into relief; in this play he sees also, 
and chiefly, the peculiar French love of the soil. 
Chantecler, the cock, is the emblem of France; he 
crowns all weather vanes. Our bird is the eagle, but 
the Frenchman has a sense of humor and does not 
mind taking the symbol of himself from his beloved 
farmyard. We might be tempted to reflect that the 
cock is not the bird which flies high, and certainly 
the foreigner, contemplating the tenacity with which 
the French have clung to their small farms, has often 
judged that the imagination of this people is too 
limited. 

In the United States we have frankly boasted of 
the grandiose sweep which we think character- 
izes our own attitude to life — "The eagle is a bird 
of large ideas; the continent is his home." But 
the Frenchman is no less an idealist, even though 
he keeps his good sense and from time to time 
smiles at himself. Chantecler believes that his crow- 



78 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

ing brings up the sun each day, that the light of the 
world depends on his singing. Though he loves the 
earth, he has no great turn for facts; the soil for 
him is poetry. In France it is the women who have 
the greatest sense of fact, and in the play the Golden 
Pheasant, who loves Chantecler, tries to persuade 
him out of his heroic illusion. When she asks what 
is the secret of his marvelous singing, his reply is 
one of the fine illustrations of French sentiment for 
the soil: "I never sing but when my claws have 
weeded the grass, and dislodged the pebbles, and 
have reached at last down to the soft black soil ; then, 
when I touch the good earth, I sing, and that is half 
the mystery, half the secret of my song — not the kind 
of song you must think up as you go along, but the 
kind that flows through you like sap from the earth 
you are rooted in." 

In a quite different direction, the ideal of the 
hearth and of the soil throws light on a much mis- 
understood side of French character. The worship 
of the ancestral hearth and of the ancestral earth 
explains the small French family. Critics of France 
have encouraged us to believe that her families are 
small because of some decadence in the race, but if 
this is true, the decadence must have started several 
hundred years ago. In France you can buy in any 
stationer's store, among other mottoes with which 
to decorate your wall, the framed copy of a sonnet, 
first printed in the sixteenth century, on "Le 
Bonheur de ce Monde. ' ' In this inventory of happi- 
ness we begin with these ideals, "A comfortable 
home, clean and beautiful, a garden wall tapestried 
with fragrant trees, fruits and good wine, a simple 
life, and few children." To-day as in the sixteenth 



FRENCH IDEALS AND AMERICAN 79 

century the French father and mother, mindful of 
the household shrine, pray for one son and for 
one daughter, and for no more children. The 
son will inherit the hearth, and the daughter will 
marry some boy who inherits a hearth, but what 
provision can be made for a second son or for a sec- 
ond daughter? The family birthplace can no more 
be divided than the graves of one 's ancestors. This 
point of view has its perils for France, now espe- 
cially when German imperialism has made a religion 
of the large family — all the more now that France 
has lost so much of her man-power. But however 
mistaken the French ideal may be in the light of 
other social theories and practices, at least their 
own theory of the family is a noble one, and it has 
made home life in France precious and sacred to a 
degree which should put to silence any criticism the 
foreigner in his ignorance might make. If the 
French hearth has fewer comforts than the American 
apartment, if it lacks the plumbing which seems 
to be the real god of the American soul, at least it 
is a genuine piety that has kept the house unchanged, 
and those who live by the French fireside are con- 
scious to-day, as few other people are, of the dignity 
of the home. 

Perhaps because of this consciousness the French 
feel the worth of the individual more than we do, 
which means of course that they appreciate the 
dignity of old age. Our American soldiers, seeing 
decrepit old men breaking stones, rather inefficiently, 
along French roads, have often commented on the 
impractical way France has of doing things ; at home 
we should use the stone crusher and some road ma- 
chines, and the old men would be out of sight. With 



80 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

us they would indeed be out of sight, in the poor- 
house perhaps, or in the old people's home, con- 
veniently shelved until their time should come to 
die. France does not like poor-houses, nor old peo- 
ple's homes. The proper home for old people is their 
own hearth. The state, therefore, humanely pro- 
vides such moderate work as aged men can perform 
by the roadside, and society finds such simple duties 
for old women — perhaps tending the flocks — as will 
keep even those whom we would call inefficient still 
in their place in society, earning with dignity their 
right to live among their fellowmen, no matter what 
their age. Once more ''Chantecler" furnishes an 
illustration, in the old hen, the cock's mother, who 
dispenses wisdom in shrewd proverbs from over the 
top of the wicker basket in which she finishes her 
days. 

When we understand this noble attitude of 
France, this frank envisaging of all of human life, 
quiet old age as well as vigorous youth, this desire 
to make life kindly and human, we are not likely to 
think so well of ourselves ; for nobody in his senses 
would choose for his own later years the poor-house 
or the old folks ' home rather than a life in the open 
air, as in France, with self-respect and an active 
work still to do for society. 



m 

When the Frenchman and the Anglo-Saxon agree 
that spirit is more than matter, the Frenchman does 
not mean exactly what the Anglo-Saxon means. For 



FRENCH IDEALS AND AMERICAN 81 

us the life of the spirit is emotional rather than in- 
tellectual ; for the Frenchman the life of the spirit is 
both intellectual and emotional, with emphasis per- 
haps on the intellect — a life of feeling, certainly, of 
sentiment and of intuition, but chiefly a life of rea- 
son. Even while we agree, therefore, in the con- 
trast between matter and spirit, we may be quite 
far apart in our understanding of the words, and the 
separation may reoccur in our use of certain other 
words, equally familiar. When, for example, we 
hear France spoken of as the land of liberty and of 
art, perhaps we miss the special point of the remark, 
since we do not know what liberty or art is in the 
French scheme of life, nor are we aware that in 
France art and science mean more nearly the same 
thing than they do in the United States. With us 
liberty implies the absence or the removal of some- 
thing — the word suggests an escape; with the 
French, liberty implies the acquisition of something, 
and the word suggests control. To us art is an ad- 
dition to life, a luxury; to the French it is a way 
of living. Our art is to be found in museums, in 
studios, in rich men's houses — we think that if ever 
we Jiave the time and the money, we too shall enjoy 
the privilege of art ; but in France art is a quality of 
every-day existence, without which life is not con- 
sidered worth while. It is hardly too much to say 
further that, to the French mind, art and science 
are practically identical ; at least, the words liberty, 
art, and science, as the French use them, involve a 
single ideal, and form together a harmonious com- 
ment on the natural conditions in which man finds 
himself. The average Frenchman, though his 
philosophy may be unconscious and inarticulate, 



82 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

conceives of the world as made up of forces and in- 
stincts, themselves neither good nor bad — ^blind 
forces, as we say — ^which however can be directed 
to good or to bad ends, according as we have the 
skill and the desire. Not all Frenchmen, of course, 
take this point of view; there are no doubt many 
who think as the middle ages taught that in essentials 
human nature and the nature of the world about us 
are bad and need repression ; there are many more 
who believe with Kousseau that nature, especially 
human nature, is essentially good, and that to be 
happy man needs only the opportunity to fol- 
low his instincts. But th§ majority of men 
and women in France approve by tradition 
and by training the humane teaching which readers 
of books associate with the great name of Aristotle 
— that excellence lies in the control which man es- 
tablishes over the forces of nature — over his own 
nature to begin with; and that without intelligent 
direction of these forces man is a slave or a passive 
victim, as a boat without a pilot is the plaything of 
the storm; but that in the measure of man's knowl- 
edge of the forces that surround him he becomes free 
to achieve whatever destiny he dreams of, as the 
pilot who understands the mechanics of sailing is 
free to sail where he will, and the wind is for him 
no longer an obstacle nor a difficulty, but a source 
of power. In this point of view art and science are 
much the same thing; man is free only in proportion 
as he controls the forces of nature and in proportion 
as these forces do not control him, and he can take 
control of these forces only by study, by intelligence, 
by self-discipline — ^virtues which in operation be- 
come science-or art. 



FRENCH IDEALS AND AMERICAN 83 

The implications of this doctrine make clear why 
the French prize above other virtues reasonableness 
and self-control, and why so eager a desire for in- 
dividualism combines in them with a profound re- 
spect for tradition. Their search for freedom, as 
we have just defined it, makes sacred a man's in- 
dividual personality, but at the same time the desire 
to understand the eternal forces of life in order to 
control them compels respect for the experiences 
and for the wisdom of the past. The world has called 
humane that Greek morality which laid upon man 
himself, rather than upon heredity or environment, 
the responsibility of choosing the best; and of all 
nations the French have preserved longest, in the 
midst of contradictory modem philosophies, the 
humane ideal. 

They say with Aristotle that where there is no 
choice of action there can be no virtue, and that 
where men are compelled to do right, evil may 
indeed be prohibited but there can be no positive 
good. The man who by temperament is ignorant 
of fear is, of course, no coward, yet he is not brave ; 
we must call him rash, and we must deny him the 
credit of being virtuous, for he has acted as irre- 
sponsibly as the feather that floats in the wind, or 
as the stone that sinks through the water. He has 
fulfilled his nature, to be sure, but without conscious 
choice. Those who are sheltered from temptation 
are neither good nor bad — they are simply untried. 
To be moral, therefore, the Frenchman thinks one 
must be absolutely free, even free from the law 
itself; for that reason we need not be surprised to 
find in French life at all points what at first seems 
an unmeaning paradox, that though the Frenchman's 



84 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

ideal of culture by its very reasonableness will 
sooner or later articulate itself into laws, yet the 
Frencbman will resent the existence of the laws — 
he will create Academies and then make fun of them 
— and why not? since an ideal so articulated becomes 
a kind of constraint toward excellence, and to that 
extent it robs man of the opportunity to be virtuous. 
When he is quite free, however, the Frenchman feels 
induced to use his liberty wisely — at least it seems 
to him common sense to profit by the experience 
stored up in the past, in the form of tradition and 
more subtly in the guise of taste. When you are 
free to make what you will of life — that is, when 
you have the skill to make what you will of it, you 
begin to see, as the profoundest kind of morality, 
the opportunity to discriminate among your ideals ; 
and this choice involves taste. Perhaps we might 
say that the Anglo-Saxon and the Latin races seek 
in general the same degree of excellence, but at least 
they define life differently, and from the difference 
in this initial definition comes a wide difference in 
the quality of their final ideals. Since the Anglo- 
Saxon has been brought up in a philosophy which 
on the whole thinks of life as a collection of bad im- 
pulses, of temptations to resist or to run away from, 
against that background his ideal achievement is 
character, goodness, which is to him the chief moral- 
ity. Since the Frenchman conceives of life as a 
mass of unorganized and neutral forces to be brought 
into order only by intelligent mastery of them, and 
since that order will vary according as his 
knowledge of other men's experiences teaches him to 
discriminate and to know the best, against the back- 
ground of this problem his ideal virtues are intel- 



FRENCH IDEALS AND AMERICAN 85 

ligence and taste, and he defines morality chiefly; 
in these terms. 

We cannot understand all that the war meant to 
France unless we reflect that in the German legions 
a very different philosophy had taken amis. The 
French soldier recognized in the atrocities inflicted 
upon his country and upon his hearth a demonstra- 
tion of ways of thought not his, which, if successful, 
would make it imposible for him to keep his way of 
thought at all. Not every German, nor many of 
them perhaps, had read Nietzsche and Treitschke, 
of whom we heard much at the beginning of the war : 
but it seems that these writers are typical, and that 
if they did not influence popular German thought, 
they were influenced by it. Their philosophy, illus- 
trated on a colossal scale by the German armies, con- 
ceives of the world as a collection of forces which 
yield power, not when they are controlled, but when 
they are followed. When we chop wood, to give the 
simplest illustration, we do not lay the log against 
the ceiling and lift the axe ; we make use of gravita- 
tion to do our work. ' ' Something is checked in every 
impulse which reason guides — better to follow the 
impulse," says this philosophy; "if the impulse is 
to selfishness, let us be more selfish ; if to cruelty, let 
us be more cruel; if war is terrible, let us add to 
it another terror; whatever else we do, let us not 
arrest life with what the French would call the con- 
trol of reason, but which to our philosophy is but 
hesitation and lack of nexve. So to take life as one 
vast selfishness, as one unvaried sailing before the 
wind, is to be successful, to be a superman." That 
such a philosophy conscientiously followed will in- 
deed yield power of a sort, the French would not 



86 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

deny, nor can our armies deny it after facing the 
poison gas and the organized devastation of recent 
years; but this is power of a kind that the French 
spirit believes ignoble — better to perish than to sur- 
vive by it, for it makes the spirit of man conform 
more and more to the purely .brute operations of 
the world, it implies an efficiency impersonal, irre- 
sponsible and cruel, and finally it strengthens those 
impulses of the body which, if uncontrolled, are but 
prison bars for the spirit ; whereas the ideal of in- 
telligent choice, the humane ideal, looks toward the 
dignity of the individual, considers the right of other 
men to be dignified in their own personalities, and 
seeks to bring about that subordination of material 
and bodily forces to the guidance of the spirit, which 
alone to the humane philosophy is freedom. 



IV 

No one can understand this French conception of 
art, as no one could understand the similar Greek 
conception, without distinguishing clearly between 
art and artifice. The first comment of the Anglo- 
Saxon on all art is likely to be that it is arMficial; 
his comment upon the French life, itself an art, is 
that it partakes too much of the quality of artifice. 
Such a comment assumes civilization as a natural 
thing. The Frenchman knows better. When our 
mothers sent us to childhood parties and cautioned 
us to behave naturally, they did not mean what they 
said ; they meant that we should wear our acquired 
arts of courtesy as though they were natural. In 



FRENCH IDEALS AND AMERICAN 87 

that sense all civilization is not natural, and French 
life, being the most highly civilized, has most the 
character of art. But the French themselves are 
even more severe than we are in condemning artifice, 
which to them is not art but its most perverse enemy. 
Art for them must be frank and sincere, a quite open 
control of means to reach an intelligible ideal. 
There is nothing secret about it; its glory is the 
large part tliat reason and calculation frankly play 
in it — as any choice between good and evil should 
be calculating and reasonable. Artifice, on the other 
hand, is the putting on of disguise, the assuming of 
methods which do not harmonize with the genuine 
purpose ; it is a too great emphasis upon means and 
a too slight valuation of the end. Art is, as it were, 
the contrast or other pole to nature ; it is the condi- 
tion which is reached when man has given an in- 
terpretation and a direction to the chaos of crude 
experience. 

In between these extremes is artifice, partaking 
of the quality of both — half directed, half mean- 
ingless. It is often a weakness of the race, how- 
ever, to prefer artifice to art, since in artifice the 
untrained mind can recognize so much of what 
seems reality — that is, so much of what remains in 
the crude state of nature. It is the very condemna- 
tion of artifice, however, that it is an imitation. In 
Chantecler's farmyard we hear suddenly the cry of 
the cuckoo. A silly hen runs up; "Which is it, the 
one in the woods, or the one in the farmer's clock T* 
**The one iq the woods," they tell her. "Ah," she 
sighs with relief, "I was afraid I had missed the 
other one." 

Illustrations of this French point of view occur 



88 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

most easily in the realms of judgment in wluch the 
Anglo-Saxon is most readily severe — in those actions 
which he will dispose of promptly as vicious or 
wrong. Some of these actions the French tempera- 
ment will excuse, or at least will reserve opinion 
on them, since they may well be sincere ex- 
pressions of genuine ideals; the ideals may 
be matters of taste, but they have been reached 
by choice, and they imply no failure on the 
actor's part to assume responsibility for his own 
destiny. Other conduct, however, a Frenchman will 
utterly condemn with more than Anglo-Saxon 
severity, though at first the case seems much the 
same as that with which he has dealt leniently; he 
has no forgiveness for behavior in which the actor 
fails to be intelligent and responsible — in which, 
consequently, the actor is insincere, wearing a mask 
on his real intentions. From this point of view a 
Frenchman was speaking of a noted writer, now in 
his dotage, who lives with a woman whom he intro- 
duces as his housekeeper, but who is really the 
mother of his children, and who now in his old age 
directs his affairs for him with something of the 
tyrant's hand. The Frenchman speaking of this case 
condemned it utterly; then remembering that he 
spoke to an Anglo-Saxon, he added quickly: '*I do 
not presume to pass judgment on his love affairs — 
I would not say that they were wrong ; but for such 
a great man to disguise the facts of his life and to 
be told to do this and to do that by some one of 
whom he seems afraid, is altogether ignoble." In 
other words, Abelard and Heloise are admirable to 
the imagination, no matter how little their career 
may recommend itself as a desirable program, but 



FRENCH IDEALS AND AMERICAN 89 

Abelard must not allow himself to be henpecked. It 
is not only in doubtful spheres of conduct, however, 
that the French exact a sincere art of life ; they are 
also on their guard against artificial goodness. They 
can understand lovers and saints equally — they de- 
spise equally the street-walker and the professional 
good man. The most revealing caution the French- 
man can give to the Anglo-Saxon is the shrewd ad- 
vice, "Do not let my people suspect that you are 
earning your living by being good." 

No better example need be sought of the French 
conception of art than in the field of manners. Even 
in France, let us admit quickly, there are people 
whose manners seem artificial and others whose 
manners are as we say natural, yet all manners 
everywhere are acquired; and in France they are 
recognized as the means in ordinary conduct by 
which man achieves freedom in his relations with 
other men. Without manners we should meet our 
fellows only on the plane of those physical appetites 
which indeed furnish their own expression, but 
which limit the range of action for the spirit. Far 
from being spontaneous or uncalculated, manners to 
the French mind should always have a definite 
purpose; if this purpose is clear and admirable, the 
manners also will be admirable and sincere, but if 
the manners have no purpose or an insufficient one, 
they will be artificial. Just how many calling cards 
one leaves at the door, is a matter of little conse- 
quence ; convention here is likely to be artificial. But 
table manners, to take the opposite extreme, will be 
sincere and noble, since they are supremely neces- 
sary for any society which would live in the spirit. 
The purpose of table manners is to disguise the un- 



90 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

doubted fact that at meal time a number of animals 
are gathered to feed. If men wished to observe in 
the process of eating no other fact than this, man- 
ners would not be necessary ; but we would make of 
the sharing of food a sacrament of higher kinds of 
sustenance, an exchange of ideas of spiritual bread, 
and to do this we cultivate such conduct as will 
prevent the physical fact from obtruding. For that 
reason we tell children not to reach too frantically 
for the breadplate. If this illustration seems 
academic, it will not seem so to those who have 
watched American soldiers and French side by side 
on the battle front at mess time. The American sol- 
dier, lined up before the kitchen, received his rations 
with great expedition, sat down on the nearest rock, 
or leaned against a tree, or simply stood in the mid- 
dle of the road, cleared his plate, washed it up, and 
got the meal over with. The French soldier, by con- 
trast, would seek always three or four companions 
and would sit down with the group, in the mud, if 
necessary, for a half hour or an hour of what could 
be called by no less dignified term than a ritual of 
friendship. Whatever the degree of their education, 
their conversation was likely to be a sharing of 
thought and a feeding of the mind. That this dif- 
ference between their use of manners and our neglect 
of them was not unnoticed on their part, they evi- 
denced in many a shrewd remark: "Why is it," one 
poilu was asked, "that even near the front you give 
so much time to your meals, and carry on such con- 
versations as one would expect only at a dinner 
table in time of peace T' "Because," answered the 
little man in blue, "if we are fighting for civiliza- 
tion, we might as well remain civilized. ' ' This ideal 



FRENCH IDEALS AND AMERICAN 91 

of manners can be summed np in the word etiquette, 
which of course we took from the French. We seem 
to have taken it, as many an American soldier now 
suspects, from the end of the French freight cars, 
where the label is pasted to show the destination of 
the cargo. The second and the third syllables of 
this word give us our * * ticket. ' ' What is etiquette ? 
To us perhaps it is a system of manners one must 
cultivate if one wishes to be like other folk in arti- 
ficial society. To the French, etiquette in every walk 
of life is quite simply the label which shows where 
you are going. Perhaps it would be better to say, 
not that your destination is the consequence of your 
manners, but that your manners are chosen care- 
fully to direct you to the end you desire. Do you 
wish to talk with the shop-keeper, or with the Presi- 
dent, or with the Sultan of Turkey 1 There are ways 
and means of doing so, and if you care enough to 
master this etiquette you can have your will, but this 
is a career for intelligence, for patience and for pur- 
pose — also for the imagination. The French think 
highly of manners for the reason that they esteem 
intelligence as a divine thing ; manners indicate that 
men and women have conceived of an ideal and are 
studying to reach it, leaving as little as possible to 
chance, and trusting as much as possible to the mind. 
*'What do you suppose is the derivation of this 
wordf*' a Frenchman was asked. ''I think it may 
come," he said, ''from the Greek word which gives 
us ethics.*^ He was wrong, but his false etymology 
indicated the truth that for the French spirit, in- 
telligence and manners are moral duties. 



92 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 



Let us return to the idea with which we began. 
What one thinks of the French will eventually de- 
pend on what choice one makes of a philosophy of 
life. It is for that reason that our stay in France 
has been particularly important, as a kind of test 
of American civilization. Differences of Ismgnsige 
can be overcome, and superficial differences of 
custom, but there will remain the question whether 
we really share the point of view which underlies 
the whole culture of France — ^whether we really be- 
lieve that the spirit is more than the body, and 
whether we interpret spirit merely as fine feeling, 
or as emotion guided by intelligence. The Anglo- 
Saxon, and those of us who live in the Anglo-Saxon 
tradition, have been brought up to respect emotion 
as something opposed to reason. Reason we say is 
cold; when we call a man calculating we mean no 
compliment. That poetry or prose we esteem most 
highly which is most emotional ; the work of Pope or 
of Swift we incL'ne to rate second, since reason so 
obviously is at the heart of it. Certainly a life with- 
out feeling, no matter how rational, would be an 
existence almost diabolical; it is a fair charge 
against such a poet as Alexander Pope that his art 
expresses too little emotion to satisfy the experience 
of the average man. Yet if one is to follow a humane 
philosophy — that is, if one is to believe that what- 
ever order is in the world must be put there by 
reason, by imagination, by the intelligence of man, 
one must class reason, intelligence and imagination 



FRENCH IDEALS AND AMERICAN 93 

as the divine instruments by which man works, and 
one must find even in ideas themselves a subject 
for emotion. It is not unusual in a French theater 
to see an audience applaud an idea as we might ap- 
plaud an action, and more than once in her history 
France has given herself as a nation to the prosecu- 
tion of the most advanced and exalted ideas. More 
than other nations she has the credit of following 
her ideals to their logical end, cost what it may ; not 
even her own superb common sense can distract her 
from the reckless pursuit of a dream once possessed. 
When Chantecler discovers that the feun has risen 
even without his song, he clings to his ideal; "I 
must sing. " " But how can you keep on when your 
work perhaps is useless, ' ' asks the Golden Pheasant. 
'*I must work." ''Even if you don't make the sun 
rise?" persists the Pheasant. **That is because I 
am the herald of a dawn more remote! My cries 
pierce the night, making those day-wounds men 
call stars. Never shall I see shine on the steeples 
the light of the finished heaven, the day made all 
of stars touching side by side ; but if I keep on sing- 
ing, punctual and loud enough, and if in each farm- 
yard the other cocks sing after me, loud enough and 
just on time, I think there will be no more night." 
"Whenr' insists the Pheasant. "One of these 
daysl" 

Since 1870, it is true, the government of France, 
and perhaps her whole people, have neglected the 
development of their national resources, have failed 
to improve village life, have let go by those modern 
inventions for comfort and sanitation which the 
American on his first arrival in France sadly misses ; 
but it is also true that since 1870 France has lived 



94 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

under sucli a threat as the American, safe in his own 
continent, cannot easily understand. And more pro- 
foundly it is true that France has permitted this 
shadow to affect only her activities in the realm of 
physical comfort; the fear of Germany has never 
touched her spirit. On the contrary, worn and dis- 
abled as in many ways she now is, France is still the 
country toward which artists and thinkers love best 
to turn, as likely to find there intelligence, reason- 
ableness, and sensitiveness to beauty, and a clear 
choice always for the things which make the soul of 
man great. 



IV 

SOCIETY AS A UNIVERSITY 

(For the opening of the American E. F. University at 
Beaune, Cote D'Or, France.) 

The university which we are about to open here 
has been built in response to certain needs. It is 
conditioned by the war background from which those 
needs have grown, but it looks also to the future. 
We intend here to save for some good use if possible 
the time that would otherwise be spent in irksome 
waiting for the ship that is to take us home ; we in- 
tend to teach and to study whatever things the wait- 
ing army may desire to learn ; we intend also to seize 
out of the very handicaps and necessities of the mo- 
ment some lasting advantage. In our earlier school 
or college days perhaps we thought of education as 
merely one of the special enterprises which a civil- 
ized state is expected to support. Perhaps we 
thought that schools and colleges spring from earth 
full-grown, that methods of instruction, however 
unpleasant, are inevitable and unchangeable, and 
that the best use of a classroom is to escape from it 
once for all into the real world. We may never have 
cared greatly to learn; we may have thought that 
no red-blooded creature ever cared to teach. Now, 
however, we are reduced to a society of fellow- 
citizens, each trying to help the other to a little 

95 



96 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

knowledge. The university which rises in these 
simple buildings and with such meager equipment 
illustrates to us what education really is when stated 
in simple and sincere terms. Here we find in what 
sense society itself — that is, any group of human 
beings who live together — may be for tJie best in- 
tellectual purposes a university. 



In the first place we observe that this university 
is devoted to adult education. Even if we are not 
all somewhat advanced in years beyond the age when 
men usually attend school or college, at least the 
experience of the war has been for most of us the 
equivalent of time, and we approach our studies here 
with a maturity not vouchsafed to the average fresh- 
man. Did we ever think it disgraceful for a man to 
be still going to school when he is, as we say, beyond 
the school age 1 May we learn here and carry back 
home with us thejmportant truth that no man should 
ever consider himself beyond the school age. The 
education of adults ought to be as natural in society 
as the education of youth. There was a time in 
American history when a college boy left his course 
at the end of the sophomore or junior year, and 
earned the money to complete his education. Fifty 
years ago some of the best New England colleges 
postponed the spring term until fairly late in the 
summer, and began the autumn term fairly early, 
so that in mid-winter the seniors could be free for 
teaching bchool. The record is clear that the stu- 



SOCIETY AS A UNIVERSITY 97 

dents who in this way varied their studies with prac- 
tice achieved far better results as scholars than 
those do now whom we try to cram for life — try, 
that is, to pour into them, as though into a reservoir, 
all the wisdom, all the technical and professional 
knowledge, all the artistic inspiration, all the good 
manners, all the ideas they will ever need. It is to 
be feared that the college graduate who is thus 
charged once for all with culture must be economical 
of the supply; many graduates are. Yet men and 
women do become well-educated ; often they explain 
the fact by saying that they learned more in some 
experience or other after they left college than in all 
the classrooms they attended. Their explanation 
amounts to this — that having come in contact with 
real life they were aware from time to time of a need 
of fresh intellectual equipment for their work, and 
they were fortunate enough to find what they needed, 
either in books or in some person who shared the 
wisdom with them; their life, therefore, became an 
alternation of study and practice — the study fitting 
them to proceed with their career, and each new 
experience in their career showing them more dearly 
what they needed to study. 

We may find the illustration in ourselves. The 
work to which we were appointed in the army was 
for the most part predestined by the preparation we 
had made in civil life, and the studies which we now 
care to follow are in many cases suggested to us by 
what we did in the war. We have discovered new 
needs, we say; now we shall study to supply them. 
Yet we would not turn to a university for help if 
we had not been accustomed to some sort of study, 
and we certainly would not have asked for the par- 



98 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

ticular instruction we now desire had not our recent 
experience taught us something about ourselves. If 
any man thinks this state of mind temporary, be- 
longing to the accidents of war, we hope here in this 
university to make such a state of mind seem the 
permanent ideal for all men and women. We hope 
that our experiment here may spread the habit of 
life-long study at home. Why should a man give up 
the good custom of withdrawing occasionally from 
his work to secure the training which that very work 
has caused him to desire ! The foolishness of trying 
to cram for life, as we have tried in our educational 
system, would be demonstrated, even if we had no 
other proof of it, by the number of things of which 
we had no immediate need when we left school, and 
which have rusted in our memory until the unlucky 
day when we wished to use them and found them out 
of repair. We tried to learn such matters at the 
wrong time of life; we studied too many things at 
once. Geography, for example, is considered still 
by many people a school subject, but were we ever 
so much interested in studying it as we are now? 
Whether we are twenty years old or thirty at the 
moment, why should we not study geography under 
the best instruction as soon as we discover the im- 
portance of if? 

Of course such a point of view, could we make it 
prevail in America, would force us to change much 
of our educational machinery. We should then find 
it an impertinent thing to impose entrance examina- 
tions upon men and women who ask simply to be 
taught. We are rather proud that we have no 
entrance examinations for this university. There is 
no reason why any person, so he be sane, should not 



SOCIETY AS A UNIVERSITY 99 

have access freely to the instruction he desires. 
Whether the candidate can profit by the course will 
in many cases be evident enough to whoever is com- 
petent to give the course ; but often where the teacher 
would expect otherwise, the instruction will prove 
unexpectedly valuable for the student, simply be- 
cause his experience has taught him a need which he 
alone best understands. The place for examinations 
is at the end of the course. Yet even in the giving 
of degrees and certificates there is some folly unless 
men preserve their common sense — unless they re- 
member that what a man knows is in no way con- 
ditioned by the parchment, however sealed and 
signed, and that a genuine access of knovv^ledge will 
appear sufficiently and inevitably in his conduct, in 
his power to live more wisely, more unselfishly, more 
happily. 

The second aspect of our university work here, 
growing out of the conditions of the moment and yet 
holding a prophecy for education at home, is that 
the teaching here will be done by fellow-citizens — 
that is, the faculty will be drawn from officers and 
men who yesterday were simply comrades in arms. 
To be sure they are asked to undertake this work be- 
cause of their standing as educators in well-known 
schools and colleges, but we prefer to think of them 
in the significance just suggested, as good citizens 
sharing with their fellows the advantage they hap- 
pen to possess in intellectual wealth. Just as 
we have thought of education on the whole 
as a subdivision of life, something apart, not 
vital, so we think of teaching too exclusively 
as a special profession. Yet if the business 
of education is to help a man to live, if the best edu- 



100 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

cation is alternate study and experience, then surely 
teaching should be a normal function for any gen- 
erous man or woman. As a matter of fact, the world 
of education, far from being an unselfish world, as 
we sometimes permit ourselves to think, is really the 
very citadel of selfishness. A few teachers indeed 
devote their lives to spreading knowledge, but so- 
ciety as a whole studies only for its own purposes, 
and the individual man and woman feels no responsi- 
bility to pass on to their fellows their share of light, 
as precious and for the giver as simple as tHe cup 
of cold water. 

We content ourselves with thinking that the pub- 
lic schools or the paid teacher at the university can 
attend to education for us ; we need not worry about 
it. There once were men and women, in days long 
gone by, who thought the ordinary charity of life 
should be the affair of specialists — of the monk, the 
priest, the hermit. We now understand better the 
obligation upon us all to provide clothing and 
shelter for our fellows in need. The most selfish 
man now loses a little sleep, even in a comfortable 
bed, if he knows a beggar is couched on the cold 
pavement in front of his house. But this is the only 
kind of charity we are as yet deeply interested in, 
and this is but physical charity. We are not 
yet quick to share the intellectual bread and drink 
and warmth which may have come to us by good 
fortune. The beggar and the starving man 
trouble us ; we are even worried over the poor who 
do not realize how poor they are; we would teach 
them to take their part in society. But we are not 
yet greatly troubled by ignorance in a man, though 
his ignorance may bring himself and his family to 



SOCIETY AS A UNIVERSITY 101 

many kinds of disaster — though his ignorance may 
poison us with disease, or with what is as dangerous, 
with prejudice and the beginnings of hate. We are 
little disturbed when such a man is conscious of his 
ignorance and would be glad to learn ; still less does 
it cost us worry if he is quite content not to know. 
If in this university we can adopt an unselfish atti- 
tude toward those fellow-citizens who wish to be 
taught the knowledge in which we are richer than 
they, perhaps we may take home with us a new ideal 
of intellectual service. That the ideal is needed, we 
can illustrate once more from ourselves. When a 
young man asks, "Have you such or such a course 
for meV" if we are compelled to say, "No, this 
course is not yet ready," the possible student, since 
he cannot get the particular course he thought he 
wanted, will turn away as though his concern with 
the university were ended. He is surprised if we 
suggest to him that since he is so far advanced in 
his studies as to outstrip what the university can 
offer, he should himself do some teaching to share 
his knowledge with those who know less. 

The third aspect of our program here which we 
hope will be permanent in education at home, is the 
preparation we have tried to make to teach a man 
what he needs. This preparation might seem to be 
inevitable and the idea of it so obvious that it should 
not be mentioned at all, but in fact very few schools 
and colleges in the United States are organized to 
meet the particular and immediate demands of in- 
dividuals. When you apply at the door of a uni- 
versity for instruction in a particular thing, you 
find that the university expects you to work toward 
a degree, or to register in a certain school; it ex- 



102 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

pects to label you ; you must be a candidate for some- 
thing. If you apply at a high school, you are 
grouped for convenience of administration with cer- 
tain others, presumably desiring the same things as 
yourself, and in order to make the group symmet- 
rical to the eye of the administrator you and the 
other members of the group are all required to take 
a few courses which you all know you do not want. 
Even here in the peculiarly free university which 
we are improvising we have heard the question 
raised of a student who takes three courses, let us 
say, one in the College Business, one in the College 
of Letters, and one in the College of Art — to what 
college does he belong? Of course he belongs to 
all three, or rather, to none of them; he is a candi- 
date, if you choose, for knowledge, and he is chiefly 
interested in life. The record ought to be complete 
and satisfying even to the statistician, when we 
know which courses he is for the moment following. 
Unfortunately, however, the ideal of teaching people 
just what they need at the moment when they need 
it, is sometimes stated in a negative way. We some- 
times hear that education will be successful when 
this or that subject shall not be taught. Yet the 
absence of a subject will not of itself make a good 
curriculum. There is danger also that when we try 
to give people just what they need we may give them 
something temporary and not what they most pro- 
foundly need ; there is danger that we may not pro- 
vide for the demands of the day after to-morrow 
or the day after that, when the students shall have 
outgrown the satisfied need of to-day. It is the hope 
of this university, not only to supply each student 
with such instruction as his present condition calls 



SOCIETY AS A UNIVERSITY 103 

for, but to teach him also the means of access to more 
knowledge as his desire for the knowledge may 
grow. 



What the needs of all of us may be, we discover 
in a general way by observing the experience of the 
world and of the men immediately about us in these 
last four or five years. Adult education we have 
learned to look upon as of the first importance, 
since the war has taught us what continuous training 
is necessary to keep our imagination young and our 
attitude toward life supple and adaptable. It is 
our frailty as human beings, unless we watch our- 
selves ceaselessly, to become stiff and unbending in 
a world that changes always. Were we hot radicals 
at twenty-one? We shall be cool and conservative 
at thirty, unless some blessed chance or some excep- 
tional wisdom keeps us adjusted to each new day. 
Momentum counts for as much in human characters 
as it does in railway trains. It hurts us to stop a 
habit or to change the direction of it — most of all 
an intellectual habit. When some such catastrophe 
as the war uproots us, forcing us to alter our way 
of life and our ideas, we observe that our neighbors 
fall into groups according as they are quick or slow 
to adapt themselves to the new world, or according 
as they are unable to adapt themselves at all. Some 
men who had spent their lives in the city with small 
opportunity for experience out-of-doors, found 
themselves quickly at home in the camp and in the 
trench. Others seemed unable to face the hard fact 



104( DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

that they had been rooted out of their old ways; 
they sought even in camp and trench for their ac- 
customed environment. Among the students com- 
ing to this university — shall I admit even among the 
teachers? — ^not all are aware of what should be 
obvious, that this university is unlike other uni- 
versities, that it has not the same equipment in 
laboratories, in libraries, in dormitories, and cer- 
tainly not the same wealth of tradition. These ex- 
amples illustrate more than our moment or this 
place; men everywhere and at all times are slow to 
change their mental attitude. It is no great wonder 
that the occasional genius whose imagination is 
alert and whose spirit is supple to the facts just as 
they are, and just as they change, should lead his 
fellows. Once he has turned them in a certain direc- 
tion, however, it is no wonder that he should some 
day incur their dislike; for he will continue to 
change, and they will prefer the first path he taught 
them. 

Whatever consistence of ideals we may strive 
for, there is no persistent way of life, outside of 
growth itself. Last year's wisdom, slavishly con- 
served, produces no Ught for to-day. The best coun- 
try, it would seem, and the safest is that in which 
the greatest number of citizens are supple-minded. 
The most dangerous country, as we have found to 
our cost, is that in which the intellectual momentum 
is strongest, in which ideas have become fixed and 
organized. To itself such a country will seem sin- 
cere. Unfortunately it will also seem to itself adapt- 
able and supple. But only by training, by life-long 
education, by the most vigilant self-examination, can 
any man or any nation remain open-minded. It is 



SOCIETY AS A UNIVERSITY 105 

the irony of this insidious momentum that we all 
think ourselves peculiarly open in spirit, and wish 
that the foreigner were not so fond of his tradition. 
We pity the Hindu in the fever districts who is re- 
luctant to boil the drinking water; his ancestors 
were not in the habit of boiling it. Poor fool, we 
think. "We ourselves, however, are not likely to 
adopt the metric system. Of course there is every 
reason why we should adopt it, except the Hindu 
reason that our fathers got on without it. We are 
not greatly different, we highly civilized men, from 
the spiders and the bees and the other small crea- 
tures of instinct whom we study sometimes with won- 
der and sometimes with patronizing self-satisfac- 
tion, noticing that what they do has been suggested 
by instinct until instinct itself has become habit. 
Man has been tempted in some phases of his phi- 
losophy to believe that his instincts, if left to them- 
selves, would prove as wise as seem the instincts of 
the bee or of the spider. The popular theorists of 
the eighteenth century spread the hope that all of 
us might be perfect if our natural instincts were al- 
lowed to develop undisturbed, and that such an un- 
embarrassed development of instinct would be the 
best education. The men and women who sought 
happiness by this program found the results some- 
what disastrous. 

Other philosophers have believed that though not 
all instincts are necessarily good, perhaps the good 
instincts might be exclusively developed until they 
should become habits, and goodness, after our in- 
stincts were once selected, might be automatic. Yet 
even though such a program of education were 
possible, it is not likely that the sort of goodness 



106 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

which habitual instincts will provide would answer 
the demands of a changing world. It is really not 
enough to be good. One must be intelligent also 
and, if possible, wise. This simple truth is not 
often realized in practice ; it might well be the 
chief object of our study here. The noblest con- 
ception of lif^ is not that which would make good- 
ness automatic; it is that which would add intelli- 
gence to goodness, which by study would cultivate 
suppleness of mind and keep the imagination alert; 
it is that which in this world of shifting problems 
would keep the character sound and the mind always 
on guard. 

Once more we might illustrate from our experi- 
ence here in setting up this university. We have 
heard some complaints from students — let us admit 
again from teachers also — that we lack books, that 
we lack tables and desks and chairs and office room, 
that we lack laboratories. Once more we are crea- 
tures of intellectual momentum. Our chief concern 
here, as it ought to be in any university, is to learn 
something about life itself, about society, about 
citizenship; is it true that men who have gone 
through the experience of this war cannot teach each 
other anything important about life unless they are 
furnished with textbooks'? The answer of course 
will be that we are here to study other things than 
life — algebra, for example, or chemistry, or law, and 
that the material for such study is chiefly stored up 
in books. True; but education has for a long time 
become too much a matter of textbooks. We can 
make experiments in physics only if the proper in- 
struments are put into our hands, but if we really 
understood physics we could make the instruments. 



SOCIETY AS A UNIVERSITY 107 

We have studied the history of science too much as 
we have studied other history, in a book; yet to 
know science we should live again the experience of 
each historic genius, we should invent anew the ap- 
paratus, make the new experiment, and arrive at the 
new demonstration. A really great teacher of law 
will teach his pupils to deduce the principles from 
such cases as normally come before them. Can no 
legal problems be found except those stored away 
in textbooks? Can we find nothing for the mind 
to lay hold on in the life around us? Some of us 
suspect that the consternation we feel at the lack of 
textbooks or other physical equipment is the realiza- 
tion that intellectual momentum has carried us out 
of touch with life ; we suspect that a wise man would 
find enough things to study and to teach right here 
in the daily events of our community. But it may 
be objected again that the great poets, the great 
novelists, and the great historians of the world left 
us masterpieces which cannot be improvised, and 
which, of course, cannot be studied unless they are 
here in the university library. Well, they are here. 
But if they were not, would it be such a terrible mis- 
fortune if we were forced to express ourselves a 
little, to make some portrait of our own life, to be- 
come to some extent ourselves poets, novelists and 
historians'? Obviously there was a day when men, 
studying their own lives, did write their own books. 
Our destiny is nobler than merely to ponder what 
other men have felt, have done, and have said, in- 
stead of feeling and doing and saying things our- 
selves which other men would care to know. In the 
countryside about us here, in the town of Beaune, in 
the city o'' Dijon, history and art may be studied to 



108 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

whatever extent we please. But it is in the end less 
profitable to pass hours admiring the beauty with 
which men long dead built their houses, than to 
work ourselves here in our university camp to make 
our own barracks and lecture halls beautiful. Our 
opportunity is to recover our intellectual independ- 
ence in a world of too many books, too many libra- 
ries, and too much physical equipment. When a man 
is once independent and alert to the life about him, 
all these things are precious as aids. They are, how- 
ever, the mere baggage and incumbrance of educa- 
tion when we find nothing to study except in books, 
and can arrive at no science unless the laboratory 
is made for us by somebody else. 



in 

The new world into which we are now entering 
will be, it seems, a world of experts. However we 
may have blundered happily through life before now, 
no man can reasonably hope for success or happi- 
ness hereafter unless he have the training to con- 
tribute his share to the society in which he moves. 
The war, more than any other experience we have 
passed through, has proved the advantages of train- 
ing. It has also proved how easily skill can be sup- 
plied where men desire it. Ships have been built, 
guns have been made, troops have been led by men 
whose occupation was quite different until they an- 
swered the call of the moment, but in each case they 
underwent training for their new task, and their suc- 
cess was in proportion to that instruction. We begin 



SOCIETY AS A UNIVERSITY 109 

to see that in the improvised armies of the world the 
undertrained man has been carried as a dead weight. 
We begin to see that society at all times must carry 
the ignorant as so much handicap for the educated. 
For the moment I speak of education in those things 
which help us to earn our living. No man about us 
can be poor without making us poor also; for we 
shall have to give him alms on the street, or if we 
prefer not to give alms that way, we must pay taxes 
to support the asylum or the hospital, or we must 
contribute to the charitable society which furnishes 
him with free medicine when he is ill or with shelter 
when he cannot pay his rent. Had we no other than 
selfish motives, we should still be obliged by every 
means possible to cure this man of his poverty — 
that is, to supply him with the technical training and 
to implant in him if we can the necessary energy to 
support himself. 

Just how shall we approach this problem? Shall 
we force the lazy and the poor to work, or shall 
we educate them to such a point of view that they 
themselves will desire further training and will feel 
ashamed not to take their part in citizenship? This 
question will press upon us from many angles ; shall 
society protect itself by physical or legal force, or 
shall it use the spiritual force of education? Upon 
our answer to this question we may be sure the 
happiness of the new world will turn. 

But the question of training is not limited to the 
economic field. Even though a man can earn his 
living, even though he flatter himself that he is in 
no way a burden upon society, he may have forgotten 
that life itself is an art or science, and that citizen- 
ship demands more than mere good-will. In the new 



110 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

world we shall expect men and women to be trained, 
not only to earn their living, but, much more, to take 
their part in the state. If we have learned nothing 
else from Germany, that country of superb efficiency 
in material things, we ought to have learned from 
her that men must be expert in citizenship unless 
they will be led like sheep, and that a nation must be 
expert in world affairs unless they will give their 
consent to the committing of international crimes. 
"Without expertness in the citizenship of one's nation 
and in the larger citizenship of the world, we shall 
be victims of that intellectual momentum which 
everywhere endangers human virtue and happiness. 
We no longer explain the causes of war with the bril- 
liant simplicity of Carlyle; when two armies face 
each other, and when we ask why those who had 
no personal quarrel with each other are now pre- 
paring to blow each other's brains out, it is not 
enough to answer, they are there because their rulers 
had a quarrel and were shrewd enough to send others 
to fight it out ; we now know that this explanation is 
insufficient. But just what is the cause of any par- 
ticular war, no one knows — at least, the historians 
who have studied the causes most profoundly usually 
disagree. It is time with some humility to study the 
effects of international manners — to seek, that is, 
such expertness in world conduct as may avoid 
setting up new causes for war even in the attempt to 
frame a lasting peace. 

It may be long before we reach world expertness, 
but in each nation the fields are quite clear which 
call for study. We must know all that can be known 
of primitive labor, of food supply, of the land; we 
must know all the facts available about machinery 



SOCIETY AS A UNIVERSITY IIL 

I 
and its proper nse ; we must know the utmost of the 
principles which govern personal relations — rela- 
tions to other men as individuals and relations to the 
state, and we must know far more than Americans 
in general have yet learned of that world of art 
within which alone a nation can fully express its 
spirit. 

The question of land is so important that any, 
citizen, one might suppose, would be ashamed 
not to be expert in it. Before anything else we must 
have food; yet in our country, as in other modern 
states, men desert the farms for the cities, food be- 
comes scarce or expensive, the country becomes the 
unproductive playground of the rich, the cities be- 
come the devouring furnaces in which the poor are 
burned up. These tendencies now repeating them- 
selves in our own history have occurred many times 
before — in ancient Eome and in societies older still. 
What shall be done about if? Food must be raised, 
yet we cannot force men back to the soil if they wish 
to leave it — cannot, that is, unless the farmer's life 
is to be an actual slavery. How to teach men the 
importance of life on the soil, and how to make that 
life so rich in rewards that men will be content to 
serve in it — that is our economic task. But in 
America a closer contact with the soil is needed for 
intellectual reasons. Our society lacks the kind of 
wisdom most easily cultivated among men who work 
close to nature, and who do tkviir thinking furthest 
removed from city artifice and from the tyranny 
of books. The country in which we find ourselves at 
this moment, France, illustrates what is called peas^ 
ant wisdom, but what for us should be the plain com-' 
monsense of citizenship. Waiting here as we are 



112 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

for our tarn to go home, we have at least the oppor- 
tunity to watch the instinctive behavior of a great 
people taking np again the ways of peace. We can 
at the same moment study the programs of ear- 
nest statesmen, moving as they must in a world of 
theory, and we can see the French peasant once more 
happily tilling the beloved farm with mud-stains on 
his uniform, stains no longer of the trench but of 
that soil on which his forefathers worked. Such a 
man asks of peace the simple privilege of continuing 
his happy labor. What we all of us ask of peace is 
the opportunity to return to our private happmess. 
But when we have become too subtle in our theories, 
we may have lost the secret of that simple peace we 
desire; we need to be reminded constantly of the 
peasant point of view, of that elemental wisdom of 
the soil without which no nation has yet been great, 
and without which not the most optimistic of us can 
expect any lasting good fortune for our own country. 
This university does not hope to impart the precise 
truth in answer to the hard questions of to-day, for 
no man yet has found the answers. But we can re- 
mind ourselves here, and find the illustrations 
around us, that life rests primarily on very simple 
facts, that quite literally it rests on the soil, and that 
our thinking should begin with a desire to keep 
close to earth, to make life on the land rich intel- 
lectually, profitable for the man who lives it, in- 
spiring to his fellows. 

When we turn from the farm to the city, we face 
the problem of machinery, which might be used as 
the metaphor of all modern difficulties. We have not 
yet found the right relation of machinery to man's 
happiness. Every inventor of a machine has no 



SOCIETY AS A UNIVERSITY 113 

doubt believed that his invention would decrease 
the labor of the world and would add somewhat to 
men's leisure. Yet it has never been proved that 
those first British weavers were altogether wrong 
who wished to annihilate the power looms. Those 
machines took man from the leisure and comfort of 
his home into the noise and torture of the factory. 
They destroyed the artisan and substituted the ma- 
chine-tender. In the countries most progressive 
economically they discouraged him who would make 
a complete and beautiful thing, who would make 
all of a chair or a table or a watch. By subdividing 
labor they have brought up a generation of machine 
hands who see but parts of the product and often 
have not even a thought of the whole. Leisure has 
not been increased in the world. The personal dig- 
nity of the laborer is constantly less. Joy in labor 
has gone out. Man is, as it wer^, caught in his own 
machine. We all realize this aspect of the modem 
world, even though we may think there is something 
to be said on the other side. What we usually say is 
that machinery is now with us, that its development 
is inevitable, that we can only ameliorate the dis- 
advantages of it. Yet since we made it ourselves, 
the thought will cross our mind at such a moment as 
this, when the world is taking an inventory of its 
handicaps and its advantages, that what a man 
created himself he ought not to look upon as fate. 
It is our problem to regulate the machinery of the 
world with constant thought to the happiness and 
the dignity of the individual, so that even to-day 
he who makes things, be he dramatist or cobbler, 
shall have the full joy of creating, and shall keep 
his full dignity as a man. 



114j democracy AND IDEALS 

In the larger sense also we are caught in the ma- 
chinery of institutions. Once more the momentum 
of intellectual habit bids us fear the instrument we 
ourselves have made. Society makes us do this and 
that, we say, whereas the conventions of society are 
of our contriving, and we are free to observe them 
or not as we choose. We say that it was dangerous 
for Germany to have so great an army, because with 
such a weapon in her hand the nation had no choice 
at last but to use it. Yet there is the same danger 
precisely from all other organizations, if man feebly 
lets go his power to change or to direct or to stop the 
machine he himself set in motion. What we are in 
danger of doing, if the lessons of history mean any- 
thing, is to suffer under our own institutions until 
we can suffer no longer, and then to go mad and in- 
augurate a revolution — as futile an approach to free- 
dom as the British weavers made when they broke 
the power looms. We must educate ourselves to re- 
tain control of all the machinery of society, with the 
same hope for society that we cherish for the man 
in the factory — that none of us may lose or diminish 
the dignity that belongs to a human being, nor the 
sacredness of his own personality. 

In the world of personal relations we shall have 
many problems which might well be discussed in this 
university. Perhaps they are too numerous to men- 
tion here. But the principle upon which they are to 
be decided is itself a question of the first order. Shall 
we force people to be good, to be healthy and to be 
happy according to some idea we may have of good- 
ness or health or happiness, or shall we submit to 
them frankly in the most general education all the 



SOCIETY AS A UNIVERSITY 115 

facts that science gives us in the field of ethics, of 
personal conduct? 

Education, let us remind ourselves again, is indeed 
a kind of force, for once a man has felt the charm 
of reason, he is not entirely free thereafter to make 
a fool of himself ; at least he can do it only with re- 
gret. But the cruder kinds of force, the laws which 
seek to make man good by removing the possibility 
of being bad — we must decide sooner or later 
whether such laws do not practically educate men 
to be feeble of will and incapable of any choice. 
We can conceive of society as of an army in which 
every citizen obeys the state only because he is 
driven to obedience. We can conceive of society 
also as of an army in which every citizen sub- 
mits to the same discipline, but for the far different 
reason that he realizes the value of cooperation. 
These societies may outwardly look the same, but 
the state of man in them is worlds apart. Liberty in 
both societies is indeed limited, in one by the police, 
in the other by the mind. It is not at all clear at this 
moment that our own country is in the way of 
choosing that sort of discipline which reason alone 
dictates. We as citizens in our moment of study here 
may reflect upon this problem. 

Not simply because we are here in France, the 
country of art, should we remind ourselves of our 
own poverty of expression. Our artistic life in com- 
parison with that of other great nations is indeed 
poor. We love painting and architecture and music, 
but except for some of us who have studied those 
things in Europe, we are not as a nation far ad- 
vanced in art. To say so frankly may hurt our pride, 
but it is necessary to recognize the fact if we are 



116 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

to mend it. The question presses home, I repeat, 
not simply because we are here in France, but be- 
cause having measured ourselves beside other na- 
tions, we find we cannot adequately express the 
ideas and the ideals we know we possess. We are 
less expert in social manners, in letters, in the other 
arts than men of whom we think, much as we respect 
them, that they have a spiritual life not deeper than 
our own. If that is indeed our conviction, there is 
no choice but to train ourselves at once in the ex- 
pression which we lack. Yet this training is ad- 
visable for deeper reasons than the mere desire to 
show ourselves in arjt the equals of other people. It 
is a fair question whether a man ever knows any- 
thing until he can express what he knows. Much 
American knowledge, we have come to suspect, is 
not knowledge at all, but a half-guessed thought or 
feeling, an inadequate information about something 
in general. The preciseness of tha. Frenchman, the 
Englishman's solid grasp of fact, are not the pe- 
culiar gifts of some one climate nor the inheritance 
of a particular blood — they are the results of train- 
ing. If we admire such abilities, we can make them 
our own. 



IV 

This university, then, though it may have a short 
career in this particular place, we hope will con- 
tinue its work in the memory of all who come here, 
and in lasting influence on our country 's future. We 
wish it to stand for the idea of national training. 
If society must use any force in self -protection, let 



SOCIETY AS A UNIVERSITY 117 

ns organize the intelligence of men, let us educate 
them. Let us make our fellows expert. We hope 
for fewer wars, but we have no wild dream that men 
will suddenly become unselfish or automatically wise. 
If wars are ever to cease it will be because society 
has learned how to avoid the causes of war. To this 
good end each one of us must see that our country 
takes its part by organizing what might be called 
a national army against ignorance, by taking arms 
against the prime cause of disease, of poverty, of 
crime, and of those strong prejudices which in times 
past have led men to hate each other. 



UNIVERSAL TRAINING FOR NATIONAL 
SERVICE 



No problem now before the United States is more 
important than the question of national education. 
Even while we were preparing for war we had oc- 
casion to feel some alarm at certain weaknesses in 
our educational system revealed by those prepara- 
tions. At the same time so amazed were we at the 
resourcefulness of the nation in times of stress, that 
we asked why our great reserves of character and 
of skill should not be mobilized more completely in 
times of peace for the constant good of the country. 
Now that the war is past we find ourselves facing 
the special problem of training for national defense. 
Some kind of army we must have, large or small, 
and some kind of training. Shall we give this train- 
ing only to a group of professional soldiers? Shall 
this training look only to the contingencies of war? 

Some of us who have been working with our fel- 
low citizens on foreign soil, and from that distance 
have been looking back toward our country, study- 
ing it with increased affection and perhaps also with 
increased concern, earnestly hope that the people at 

118 



j UNIVERSAL TRAINING 119 

home will compel training for national defense, and 
that they will interpret national defense in a larger 
way than any nation has yet thought of. We have 
.in mind of course the total needs of American educa- 
tion — the need of more and better schools, the need 
of large revisions in college and university cur- 
ricula, the need of a strong national department of 
education. For the moment, however, we have in 
mind particularly the defects of education observed 
in the United States Army in France, and also 
what the educational program in the American Ex- 
peditionary Force has done to remedy those defects ; 
and since we are convinced that the time has come 
for all progressive nations to organize for peace as 
well as for war, conceiving of national defense as 
preparation for both peace and war, we would ad- 
dress ourselves for the moment to the specific prob- 
lem of national training. 

The principles according to which we would 
envisage such national training are five. In the 
first place, the idea of universal service should be 
expanded to include training for all other duties of 
citizenship besides military, and to include training 
of all prospective citizens, even of those physically 
unfit for military service. In the second place, the 
present temporary cantonments in the United 
States, or equivalent cantonments, should be con- 
verted at once into permanent training schools for 
citizenship. In the third place, a permanent educa- 
tional corps should be added to the army ; this corps 
should be formed of experts in school, in vocational, 
and in the more elementary college subjects; from 
time to time competent officers in other branches 
of army service should be assigned to this corps. 



120 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

In the fourth place, there should be a compulsory 
training period of twelve months with the colors, 
from September first to September first or from 
June first to June first, or between any other dates 
which should be found practical — care being taken 
simply to fit this period into other educational or 
vocational obligations. This training should be be- 
gun between the ages approximately of eighteen or 
twenty, perhaps a little earlier or a little later, as 
experience might prove advisable. Approximately 
one-half of this training should be for military 
science and for physical development, the other half 
for training under military discipline in school, in 
vocational, or in college subjects. In the fifth place, 
the citizen in training should be free to elect the 
kini of civil education he receives, with the ex- 
ception that training in elementary subjects should 
be compulsory for illiterates and for the foreign- 
born. 



The mobilization of the American Army demon- 
strated that an astounding number of native-bom 
citizens are illiterate, and that of our foreign-bom 
citizens a still larger number cannot read or write 
the English language, and in some cases cannot 
understand it. The mobilization demonstrated also 
that an appalling number of our young men are not 
in proper physical condition. It is unlikely that any 
economic or social pressure will tend to remedy 
these evils. The illiterate citizen can make a living 



UNIVERSAL TRAINING 121 

of a sort more or less satisfactory to himself, and 
the foreign-born can associate with others of his 
origin, and both classes can avoid that social criti- 
cism which would urge them toward complete citizen- 
ship. In fact, economic and social pressure tends 
actually to segregate in our country the illiterate ele- 
ments and the various groups of foreign-bom, and 
unless some strenuous effort is made to weld all these 
groups into one, there is no likelihood of change in 
these unfortunate conditions. The program of edu- 
cation in the A. E. F. demonstrated, on the other 
hand, that even brief courses of study followed in- 
tensively under military discipline are adequate to 
correct illiteracy and to teach our language. The 
whole experience of our army demonstrates further 
that if brought together in a common purpose, the 
various elements of our population can be speedily 
made into one nation. We should now find a means 
to provide these benefits for our country in time of 
peace. 

Even those soldiers who were neither illiterate nor 
unable to command the English language showed to 
a distressing degree the inefficiency of our popular 
education. The men waiting to return to the United 
States were pathetically eager to master some trade 
or some profession in order to be sure of a worthy 
place in the society to which they were returning. 
Far more than one-half of the A. E. F. were with- 
out adequate training for any trade or profession, 
and perhaps because of the intellectual stimulus of 
their experiences in the war the men themselves were 
uncomfortably aware of their lack. It is disturbing 
to think that they may miss their proper place in 
their generation. It is more disturbing to reflect, 



122 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

however, that even had they not gone to Europe in 
the army, they would still have been without train- 
ing for professions or trades; in fact, through the 
army educational program many of them accident- 
ally received such training and preparation for 
citizenship as is provided nowhere in the United 
States for any large group of men. It seems folly 
not to make permanent in our national life for all 
citizens the advantages which the soldiers in France 
temporarily enjoyed. 

The mobilization of our army showed, on the other 
hand, how rich potentially the manhood of our na- 
tion is, and how quickly it responds to the regular 
life and the scientific care which even a hurried prep- 
aration for war supplied. The soldiers in general 
enjoyed such health as is the rule in no other com- 
munity. The total discipline of their life — regular 
hours, rational diet and decorum of conduct — 
brought out their best physical and moral traits, so 
that to look at the average group of American sol- 
diers was a satisfaction ; and this condition of health 
and good living quickened to the full their intel- 
lectual capacities, so that those who taught them in 
all subjects, from the most elementary to the most 
advanced, wondered at their eagerness and their 
ability to learn. Furthermore, the life in the army 
developed in our youth a sense of social cooperation 
which some of us had feared was lacking in the 
American character. No body of men in our coun- 
try seems now more eager to study and to deal in- 
telligently with the social problems which confront 
us than the men of the army, who have been learning 
in a kind of laboratory course what responsibility 
man owes to his fellow. The fact that in the army 



UNIVERSAL TRAINING 123 

they met other Americans from all parts of the coun- 
try, developed a new sense of nationality; and the 
meeting in the same ranks of rfch and poor, de- 
veloped a new sense of democracy. These advan- 
tages of health and morals, of intellectual awaken- 
ing, of patriotism and of democratic sympathy, we 
desire to provide for each generation in our country, 
as much for those who are never called into battle 
as for those who in time of need answer the call. It 
is the logic of our course in this war that our army, 
organized to defend the ideals of civilization, at the 
end proved itself to be a vast university of citizen- 
ship. It would be the most profitable result of the 
war for our country and for the world, should this 
university in citizenship become permanent for all 
our people. 

This training should be provided for all men not 
mentally defective. Even those who are physically 
unfit for military service can derive great benefit 
from such bodily training as is suited to their needs, 
and quite as much as other men they can derive 
benefits from training in the non-military duties of 
citizenship. Much of the disruptive thinking in so- 
ciety is done by men physically handicapped, whose 
point of view toward their fellows is warped or em- 
bittered by their own misfortunes. In many cases 
their philosophy of life would be made more gen- 
erous by an improvement in their health, and in all 
cases society owes it to them to provide even more 
adequate advantages than for those who start life 
without handicap. Association with their fellow 
citizens in a national system of training would prob- 
ably develop in these men at least a greater sense of 
unity with the nation and an increase of pride in. 



IM DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

what they themselves could contribute to society as 
a whole. In a very large number of cases the physi- 
cal defects which now weaken the youth of our coun- 
try can easily be corrected, but like illiteracy they 
can be corrected only if society insists on bringing 
the individuals under the proper course of train- 
ing. 

The advantage of converting the present training 
cantonments or equivalent cantonments into perma- 
nent training schools is obvious. In our country 
much sentiment attaches to places of education, and 
if we are to instal in our national life a vast system 
of training in citizenship, it is in our temper to make 
of those places where this citizenship is taught, 
shrines as it were of affection. If men look back 
with reverence to their college campus or to the 
school in which they first had some glimpse of the 
possibilities of life, there is reason why these larger 
schools should be far more deeply revered in which 
men from whole sections of the country would be 
brought together for training in the total defense 
of their homes — ^in the defense of their country 
against possible enemies on sea or land, and in its 
defense against disease, ignorance and incompe- 
tency. 

In these permanent schools much of the material 
now used only for purposes of war could be used 
constantly for purposes of peace. The materials 
which in times of war must be gathered hurriedly, 
instruments for engineering, for chemical research, 
for hospital and sanitary service, would be main- 
tained at the highest point of excellence in the 
laboratories of these schools. At the American 
E. F. University at Beaune the laboratories in 



UNIVERSAL TRAINING 125 

chemistry, physics, bacteriology, medicine, biology, 
engineering, fine arts and music, were supplied 
largely out of the resources of the army. On the 
return of the army to the United States it would 
have been in the highest degree desirable if these 
laboratories could have continued to serve educa- 
tional purposes, and other laboratories also on a 
much larger scale, which would then have been avail- 
able at short notice for any emergency of national 
defense. 

If it is desirable to maintain for permanent uses 
the material instruments which our army tempo- 
rarily collects for war, it is still more desirable to 
retain for the advantage of our country in times of 
peace the educational resources which the army must 
also improvise for war. A large part of the duty of 
the modem army involves scholarship of a high 
order, knowledge of languages, of history, of inter- 
national politics and of course of the sciences. A 
nation which trains for all duties of citizenship, civil 
as well as military, will find it advantageous to 
develop in peace times the same scholarship in the 
same things. 

To conduct such schools as are described above, 
experts would be needed for the teaching of all ele- 
mentary and secondary school subjects, for the 
teaching of trades and vocations, and for the teach- 
ing of such subjects of college or university grade 
as the youth in training would be studying at the 
time. In addition to the experts who would form 
the nucleus of this educational corps, teachers should 
be recruited from officers in other branches of army 
service, who from time to time would thus have an 
opportunity to expand their own scholarship, and to 



126 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

make a direct contribution to the intellectual and 
social life of the country. Hitherto it has been only 
by accident that armies have been permitted to do 
constructive social work; after a war with Cuba, for 
example, the army surgeon is permitted to clean up 
a fever district. There is no reason why the train- 
ing of engineers, of surgeons, of officers in every 
branch of the service, should not at all times be put 
at the disposal of the country. 

It will be noted that in the period of training the 
proportion of non-military education is approxi- 
mately equivalent to the amount of time devoted to 
study yearly in the average high school or college. 
The time therefore spent in national training would 
not be in addition to the years required for higher 
education. The period of training should be so 
situated between high school and college that those 
young men, the comparatively few of our country, 
who enjoy a college education, could during the year 
of service cover the ground of their Freshman work, 
and could also learn habits of application and of 
study at the moment when they most need to learn 
them. In fact, it is not improbable that the months 
spent in the unusually favorable conditions of regu- 
lar hours and good health would save time for the 
average student. No one familiar with college life 
is blind to the fact that college students ordinarily 
waste the greater part of their time; this is true 
even if one admit that an important benefit of col- 
lege life is the social contact established with other 
men of one's age. It is not so generally realized 
that the average college student is extremely care- 
less in his diet, and on the whole is far below the 



UNIVERSAL TRAINING 127 

physical state in which at his age he should be. It 
has been the hope of college athletics to correct this 
deplorable condition, but in this hope college 
athletics have been disappointing. Army life, hpw- 
ever, as this war has demonstrated, provides for 
every soldier a finer system of training than athletes 
usually submit themselves to in times of peace. A 
student in perfect health will waste less time in idle- 
ness and will make greater progress when he does 
study than the average college boy as we have known 
him in the United States. 

Obviously we must teach the illiterate to read and 
write, and we must teach the foreign-born to use our 
language. Aside from this obligation, however, an 
essential feature of national training should be the 
complete liberty of the man trained to select his 
studies. The nation should undertake during this 
year of training to advance him as far as possible 
in any course of study which he desires and is 
enuipped to follow. If he looks forward to busi- 
ness, to agriculture, to industry, then his training 
should help him toward that career. If he expects 
to attend college, the training should take the place 
of his Freshman year. If he desires to study art, 
Iiis training should be in art. Experience with the 
educational program in the A. E. F. demonstrated 
the almost unthought-of potentialities in the Ameri- 
can character. Our soldiers apparently have as 
great native endowments in the arts as the most 
favored of the Latin races, and a system of national 
training which should try to develop all the latent 
powers of the individual would shortly transform 
our national life. Perhaps the temptation of any 



128 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

such system as we are here suggesting would be 
to prescribe for the youth of the nation what it 
should study. This temptation must be absolutely 
avoided. To yield to it would be to overwhelm the 
whole country in that form of intellectual Prussian- 
ism which now fortunately is found only in the con- 
servative catalogues of some of our universities — 
those which persist in prescribing subjects which 
have become dead, or in teaching vital subjects as 
though they were dead. Beyond this suggested sys- 
tem of national training, the universities should still 
pursue their work of teaching and research, func- 
tioning according to their special facilities. But the 
nation should undertake to make an inventory of its 
citizenship in each generation, and to advance every 
man as far as possible toward the work to which he 
feels called. 



in 

Such a system of training as is here suggested 
would be very expensive. The items of expense 
would be the buildings and their up-keep, their 
equipment, the teachers who would form the frame- 
work of the educational corps, and the cost of pro- 
viding subsistence for the men in training. All 
these expenses, however, should be charged frankly 
to national education, and the nation should realize 
that in one form or another this expense is unavoid- 
able. "We may refuse to combat illiteracy and dis- 
ease, we may refuse to assume responsibility for 
the making of the foreign elements in the United 



UNIVERSAL TRAINING 129 

States into a unified nation ; but in that case we shall 
pay for the support of poor houses, of hospitals, of 
jails and of police, and we shall pay even more 
heavily in loss of national health and efficiency. If 
we are to check the ignorance, the disease and the 
discontent which in various ways menace our so- 
ciety, we must be ready to pay as much for education 
as we are now prepared to invest in international 
canals or in emergency war bills. 

It is a tendency of our country to disguise the cost 
of education. We remit taxes on educational build- 
ings and on land devoted to educational purposes, 
and in our bookkeeping we distribute the cost of 
tuition. Yet even when the whole account is shown, 
it does not appear that we give generously to educa- 
tion, though as a nation we have enjoyed the reputa- 
tion of great generosity in this field. Until we are 
ready to pay for popular education, we are not 
likely to achieve even approximately those minimum 
results which we sometimes try to make ourselves 
believe we are reaching. In order to give even one 
year of sound training to every young man in our 
country, it will be necessary to assume the cost as a 
national expense. There should of course be some 
financial return to the country in the greater effi- 
ciency of our citizens and in the decrease of dis- 
ease and of irresponsibility. But whether or not 
such a result does follow, the nation should be asked 
now to face the internal peril of illiteracy and of 
ignorance as frankly and as generously as it faced 
the menace of an enemy from abroad. 



130 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 



IV 

A system of training so organized would have 
obvious advantages. In a general way each train- 
ing camp would tend to become an educational cen- 
ter. More specifically, the annual inventory of our 
educational shortcomings would point out for our 
school system the task to which it should address 
itself. Undoubtedly the result would be thaf year 
by year the schools would send to the training camps 
generations better prepared ; by keeping the election 
of the courses in the training camps entirely free, 
we should be able to assist each student to make 
progress from the point at which his education had 
left off, and the gradual rise of standard in the 
courses in this year of training would be the 
barometer of the intellectual progress of the nation. 
The year of training would also show which parts of 
the country were providing inadequate facilities for 
education, and means could be taken by the national 
government to improve the elementary schools in 
those districts. It is not unlikely that as a result of 
this national training and of the statistics which it 
would make available, the nation would soon be 
persuaded, as it should have been persuaded long 
ago, to establish in the federal government a strong 
department of education, and that department would 
collaborate with the army in training for citizen- 
ship. 

But the most direct advantage would be for the 
large majority of our young men who at present re- 
ceive no high school training at all, nor even much 



UNIVERSAL TRAINING 131 

elementary education. To insure for them a rea- 
sonable start in life would be worth any cost and 
any effort. In no other way than by national train- 
ing undertaken as a national expense can this vast 
body of each generation be sought out in the small 
town, on the farm, inHhe overcrowded city, and can 
be taught the things essential to each individual 
case. To care for this neglected majority would be 
really to train our nation. 

Perhaps the by-product of such a system of train- 
ing as is here outlined would be the bringing of the 
army into a sane relation with society. Through 
the fear of militarism which possesses the modem 
world, it has become our custom to support the army 
and to admire military science only in fiioments of 
extreme need. As a result, the soldier in war time 
receives an adulation perhaps exaggerated, and in 
peace times he is neglected, feared, certainly put to 
no good use. At this moment when our army thinks 
of returning, it is interesting to consider that every 
man in it hopes to go back to some constructive work 
for his country, except the professional soldier. He 
can look forward only to inactivity until the spas- 
modic need of him arises again. Perhaps society is 
wise in fearing the army which has nothing to do; 
it has been stupid, however, in finding no use for 
the army in time of peace. If we could add to the 
military functions of our army this constructive kind 
of national defense, we should be providing a noble 
and honored career for the man on whom in extreme 
moments the life of the nation depends. We should 
be bringing the soldier into constant relation with 
the social needs of the country he serves, and we 
should be teaching every youth within our borders 



132 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

that broad conception of citizenship expressed for 
the Anglo-Saxon race by John Milton, ''I call a com- 
plete and generous education that which fits a man 
to perform justly, skillfully, and magnanimously, all 
the offices both private and public, of peace and 
war." 



VI 

UNIVERSITY LEADERSHIP 



In this moment of recovery, when it would he a 
satisfaction to name some positive fruit of the war, 
not merely the checking of a foe but some advance in 
the condition of mankind, we like to believe that the 
war has indicated anew the power of the mind if 
rightly trained, and consequently the importance of 
education. Even in the midst of what seemed a trial 
by force, the play of mind was imposing and decisive. 
No wonder if the armies in the field began to cherish 
that oldest of deferred hopes, the vision of a world 
made orderly by intelligence. The war forced us all 
to think a little ; it suggested at last what might hap- 
pen if we all thought a great deal. 

Other wars before now have inspired this vision 
in other men, but hitherto, as I said, the hope has 
been deferred. It is not easy to be thoughtful or 
intelligent, and human beings will not use the mind 
they have, much less train it, unless a strong motive 
compels them. Such a motive has been supplied by 
a state of war but never hitherto by conditions of 
peace. When the nation is in great peril we will 
make sacrifices — that is, we will use our minds, we 
will cooperate intelligently with our neighbors, we' 

133 « 



134 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

will improve ourselves ; when peace comes, however, 
we relax these and other forms of discipline. It is 
not a moral substitute for war that we need ; for war 
there can be no substitute, as there can be none for 
peace. But we need a motive to become civilized, a 
motive to use our intelligence in the blessed years of 
tranquillity, a motive at least as strong as those 
which in the time of danger urge us toward good 
sense, imagination, and sympathy. Until we have 
discovered such a motive, we must not expect as the 
fruit of the war just over any final installation of 
reason in the affairs of men. 

But we may note how near we came during this 
war to a permanent reliance upon intelligence, and 
we will retard so far as we can the failing of that 
reliance, if fail it must. It is something that for a 
time at least men in large numbers became aware of 
the mind, and a few of us dare believe that if the 
schools and universities put themselves at the ser- 
vice of this temporary regard for the intellect, there 
need be no relapse but continued progress. We base 
our hope on what we saw in the armies abroad. The 
power of the mind was revealed to the soldier in his 
own resistance to privation, to suffering and to mo- 
notony, in his ability to rise above evil conditions 
and to remain above them. The life of civilized 
man, we say, is the life of the spirit. In the trenches 
men lived in the spirit or not at all. The rest, the 
warmth and the food usually found in the material 
world, were for the time transferred to the world 
of ideas, and were there studied affectionately in all 
their implications. 

From this study three conclusions seemed in- 
variable among the fighting men — -that the war was 



UNIVERSITY LEADERSHIP 135 

but a preparatory safeguarding of the world so that 
the real problems might be grappled with ; that these 
problems would be solved only by the well-trained; 
and that if the world is to be democratic, good train- 
ing should be made accessible to all men and women. 
In their brief moments of leisure the soldiers dis- 
cussed constantly the questions political, social and 
economic, which now confront us, and noth- 
ing could be more uniform than their conviction 
that to take part in solving these questions one 
must be expert and prepared. They almost 
grasped the truth too often unmentioned by those 
who would settle the affairs of the world, that 
justice itself is not to be achieved simply by good 
intentions, but must be preceded by adequate knowl- 
edge. With such a temper in the armies it is not 
surprising that the war was a gigantic debate as 
well as a conflict of arms. Many of us expected the 
armistice to bring the kind of peace which is silence. 
When instead it seemed to let loose a chaos of dis- 
cussion, we were disappointed. We forgot that the 
discussion had been going on throughout the war, 
only covered over by heavy artillery and by the cen- 
sor. Not all of the discussion, of course, was wise 
or useful, but it was the sincere attempt of a vast 
number of human beings to use their minds, many of 
them for the first time; and those who saw that 
awakening wondered at the eagerness to read, to 
study, to be informed, at the fierce hunger for bet- 
ter intellectual equipment, at the impatience which 
turned away from those who had nothing but ad- 
monition to offer, and at the attention which followed 
those who seemed really to know something about 
anything. Without formulating their convictions 



136 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

under too many points, our armies believed anew 
that men and women should have a decent place in 
the world, and should be equipped not only to occupy 
that place, but also to grow out from it into the 
enjoyment of life as a whole. They believed, that 
is, in a complete education. Whatever may have 
been the concern of the diplomats, our fellow-citizen 
in arms, when he spoke of the future, seemed but to 
sound variations on the fine ideal written into the 
program of the British labor party, and worthy of 
being written into all plans for democracy, — to 
"bring effectively within the reach not only of every 
boy and girl, but also of every adult citzen, all the 
training, physical, mental, and moral, literary, tech- 
nical, and scientific, of which he is capable." 

But this was during the war. What reason have 
we for hoping that this intellectual ferment has not 
quickly subsided? During the armistice the large 
number of American soldiers in France who enjoyed 
opportunities in the army schools and in French and 
British universities, had a motive toward study, 
even though the excitement of war was withdrawn. 
They believed that expert skill would hold every 
strategic position in the new era, and the monoto- 
nous waiting in a foreign land made them the prey 
of fears lest they might not be expert enough to 
earn their living or to take up again their old place 
in society. Those who had no trade or vocation 
were eager to acquire one, and those who already 
had such skill were eager to convert it into richer 
living. Now that we are at home again, these two 
motives seem to operate no less strongly in the 
majority of men, and the second motive seems es- 
pecially persuasive. Those Americans who have 



UNIVERSITY LEADERSHIP 137 

been taught a trade or a profession begin, many 
of them, to realize that they have not been taught 
to live. 

All classes of society feel this motive to educa- 
tion, but the workingmen perhaps interest us 
most, since they are taking steps to help themselves. 
The establishment of workingmen 's schools or col- 
leges abroad and the first scattered attempts to es- 
tablish them in this land, can mean only that the 
worker trained in his craft begins to suspect the 
truth — that without education also in the things of 
the spirit, in the world of ideas, he must remain the 
servant or at least the passive follower of other men. 
He who works with his hands may make more money 
than they who follow the learned professions, but 
he does not on that account feel that his life is as 
rich as theirs ; when he meets them face to face he 
knows that in some way which seems unjust he is 
their inferior. Knowledge is indeed power, and 
there can be no equality among men until there is 
an equal opportunity for education. The students 
in the American army showed an interest in agricul- 
ture and in business, but they showed an even greater 
interest in history, in social science, in literature and 
in the fine arts. They wished to earn their living, 
but they wished also to live. The schools which 
workingmen have established abroad, in Belgium, 
for example, look toward liberal culture, toward 
raising the craftsman to an intellectual equality 
with the capitalist, and toward making profitable his 
free hours. It is mortifying to scholars that when 
their associate, the educational expert, proposes a 
new curriculum for training the world, he usually 
drops those subjects which if wisely taught and stud- 



138 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

ied enrich leisure, and he stresses those which at 
best can only fatten a pay envelope; whereas when 
the workman founds a school of his own, he asks 
like a Renaissance prince to enter that general field 
of knowledge which we call humane. 



n 

This difference of aim is the one thing in the pres- 
ent situation which ought to alarm us who are pro- 
fessional educators. Thousands of men and women 
to-day crave knowledge and desire to be taught, but 
it is not clear that they desire to be taught by us. 
They will go where they tliink to find intellectual 
leadership, but possibly they will not look for that 
in the university. The university ought indeed to 
lead, to provide teachers and ideas and inspiration, 
but perhaps our universities and our colleges too, 
for that matter, are not in the proper relation to 
society to furnish this service. They receive a kind 
of respect from the world at large and they seem 
not likely to lack students, but in the moment when 
humanity is to some extent conscious of an intel- 
lectual ambition, it may not be to the universities 
or colleges already established that men and women 
will turn, nor to the professional educator. It is 
hardly an exaggeration to say that the university 
and the professor are to-day but the half-hearted 
resort of those who seriously desire to know the 
world and to know life. 

This prejudice is not surprising if we recall tKe 
beginnings of our older colleges. Some of them 



UNIVERSITY LEADERSHIP 139 

have remained small colleges, and others have be- 
come universities; for the moment, however, the 
terms may be interchangeable, since with us in 
America the conditions of leadership are the same 
for the college in its sphere as for the higher institu- 
tion. It is therefore illuminating to recall that our 
colleges were usually built in response to an educa- 
tional need, such as the world feels to-day ; that their 
most glorious years were often their earliest, and 
that during those years there was close collaboration 
between the college and the community. The stu- 
dents came from the vicinity ; it was for them that the 
college had been built, and not infrequently they 
boarded with the townsfolk, who took them into their 
homes less to earn money than to help in their educa- 
tion. The influence of these homes was for many 
a boy no small part of his training. The teachers 
also and the trustees were usually representatives 
of the community, and their work was consecrated 
by a sense of usefulness to their neighbors. In some 
colleges the neighbors had actually built the halls 
with their own hands, and in all of them the public 
attended the commencement exercises, to judge by 
the speeches and essays of the graduates whether 
the boys were doing as the community had the right 
to expect. If the teacher in those days enjoyed a 
prestige upon which we now look back with envy, it 
was because he had earned the gratitude of his fel- 
lowmen by the great services he rendered; he gave 
them the aid they desired. So long as the college 
had such teachers, it continued to be the spiritual 
product of the locality, as truly a flower of the land- 
scape as its chapel tower seemed to be, rising from 
the clustered trees of its campus. 



140 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

Few of us would deny that the colleges, or the 
universities into which some of them grew, have to 
a certain extent lost this position of honor. We say 
that times have changed, and that the American 
community no longer asks the kind of help scholar- 
ship is qualified to give; we imply that all else de- 
teriorates, but our colleges retire into the obscurity 
of a finer and finer excellence. There is another ex- 
planation, however. The colleges after a while for- 
got that their life was bound up with the life of 
the community of which they were the product ; they 
detached themselves from the landscape and became 
at last aliens in their own birthplace. In the early 
days the college trained the boys of the neighbor- 
hood and sent them into the world, to remote places, 
to be good citizens and to bring credit to their home 
and to their Alma Mater. In time, however, the 
sons of honored graduates began to return to the 
campus where their fathers had passed their youth. 
These youngsters could admire the college, but they 
had nothing in common with the townsfolk, from 
whom, as they would feel, their fathers had risen; 
and to the college unfortimately it began to seem 
more creditable to be training the sons of alumni 
even though they came from afar, than to be helping 
those boys at the very door whose parents perhaps 
had enjoyed no education at all. The estrangement 
from the community followed quickly, once the col- 
lege took such an attitude. The students now rarely 
belong in the landscape ; the townsfolk regard them 
as strangers, perhaps a bit snobbish, and would not 
care to receive them into their homes, even if the 
students would condescend to be so entertained ; the 
immediate neighborhood no longer attends the com- 



UNIVERSITY LEADERSHIP 141 

mencement, but devotes its energies to selling haber- 
dashery and soda-water to student patrons, or from 
time to time considers the advisability of taxing the 
college property; and the professor is ignored, un- 
less by his own personality he makes a place for 
himself among his neighbors — for in his scholarly 
functions he is, like the college, detached, and the 
community has little occasion to know him. 

Somewhat in this condition, as it seems to me, are 
the American College and the American University, 
more especially the institutions in the East, at the 
moment when they should draw to themselves the 
eyes of all seekers after truth and life. Their plight 
is that of the fabulous tree which having sent forth 
branches so long that they touched the ground, de- 
cided to use them as roots, and worked itself free 
at the trunk. The separation may prove fatal, but 
we seem to think of it as an achievement. Our col- 
lege catalogues take pains to show that the students 
come from the ends of the earth, but never boast 
that the majority of them come from within a radius 
of ten miles. If we are of the academic cult and 
are advising a boy where to seek his education, we 
will of course point out the advantage of going far 
from home. Any college we live next to is a poor 
one. 

We must begin again. If the university is to be 
our intellectual leader, it must approach with sym- 
pathy the community in which it is placed, and must 
put its scholarship at the disposal of its neighbors. 
Let the foreign student be welcome, whether he 
come from across the state, or across the continent, 
or across the world ; but let the first care be for those' 
within our gates. Said Emerson to the New Eng- 



142 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

land abolitionist with the latest news from Barba- 
dos, *'Love your neighbor, love your wood-chopper; 
why this incredible tenderness for black folk a thou- 
sand miles away?" The spirit of our times says 
to the university, ''Serve the place that produced 
you; why this ambition to teach anybody, so he be 
not of your own household?*' 



in 

If the university would really serve the men and 
women around it, it must not insist on solving 
the problems of a society that has disappeared. And 
if it asks the present America what problems to 
solve, the answer will show more often the wish 
to do than the wish to hear about something. To- 
day we would live more deeply than before, and 
since to live requires a technique as well as a theory, 
we ask for the kind of knowledge that can be con- 
verted immediately into living. This disposition is 
as strong at home as it was among the army students 
abroad. Offer a course in the history of painting, 
in the history of music, in the history of engineer- 
ing, and you will have few students, however profit- 
able such instruction in some circumstances might 
be ; but offer to teach men how to paint, how to plpy 
the piano, how to be engineers, and your classes 
overflow. For us Americans there is no permanent 
joy in being a looker-on. 

This wash to practice life colors our thoughts of 
our two principal needs — the need of skill to earn 
our living, and the equal need of skill to enjoy our 



UNIVERSITY LEADERSHIP 14S 

leisure. Obviously the skill to earn one's living is 
a practical need, and here the university most often 
hesitates to be of aid. If it should collaborate with 
the whole community, suggesting the answer to the 
problems of business, of industry as w^ell as of the 
professions, many scholars fear that the institution 
would degenerate into a vast trade school, and that 
the spirit of scholarship would perish. Whether the 
university ought to become a trade school depends 
on what kind of trade school we mean. There is 
every reason why the teaching of trades should be 
enriched by contact with the spirit of scholarship. 
The living we earn, whether in a workshop or at a 
desk, is but a door to life, and the university can 
show us to what good things of the spirit our trade 
or profession is a natural entrance, having in mind 
that the carpenter does not wish to live in a world 
simply of wood and tools, nor the doctor in a world 
of sick-beds and medicine, but that both wish to ex- 
ercise their calling in a common world of ideas, I 
believe it is true that those who work with their 
hands consciously desire to live in the world of 
ideas, but if they had not this desire, it would be 
the duty of the university to impart it. From the 
windows of his study the scholar can imagine the 
whole of society and all the avenues by which men 
and women must be served; he sees what the car- 
penter can contribute to the safety, the comfort and 
the beauty of the home, he sees what the plumber 
achieves for the public health, he sees how vital is 
the ministry of him who brings the morning milk to 
the house of children, how critical to heart and mind 
the service of those who print our books, how large 
the usefulness of those who carry our letters and 



144. DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

speed tJie exchange of the world 's ideas. The schol- 
ar can see all this ; why should he not ennoble human 
toil by sharing his vision with the carpenter, the 
plumber, the milkman, the printer, the postman? 
Surely there could be no loss to scholarship in giv- 
ing them a sight of life as a whole and of the dig- 
nity of their own work in it. Engineering was once 
thought to be no proper concern of the university, 
but even the last tardy conservative now honors the 
engineer who is a scholar and who therefore makes 
of his skill a social and a spiritual force. Not long 
ago a dentist was considered no better than a tooth- 
carpenter, but the presence of dental schools has 
not injured our universities, and the work of schol- 
arly dentists throughout the nation has been for 
the advancement of science and the happiness of 
mankind. Droll though the prophecy may sound, 
we shall yet train our scholar-carpenters and schol- 
ar-plumbers, who will make their contribution to 
our spiritual sanity, as well as serve us with their 
hands. Is there danger to scholarship here ? I would 
rather say that once the plumber or the carpenter 
sees the bearing and the implications of his work, 
he will be, in the words of one of my colleagues, lost 
to mediocrity forever. We shall have scholarly 
workmen or none at all, for without some play of 
mind, some sufficient meaning, all labor now begins 
to seem intolerable. The work must be done, but 
before men will undertake it it must be invested with 
new significance. 

The second need of us all to-day is skill to enjoy 
leisure. We shall have more free time, but what 
can we do with it? Recently Georges Duhamel wrote 
of the peril to Franch manners and culture, now 



UNIVERSITY LEADERSHIP 145 

that the laborer has an eight-hour day — some extra 
leisure, that is, which the French poet did not think 
his countrymen were trained to profit by. If leisure 
is an embarrassment for the French, with their ca- 
pacity for self -entertainment, their wide-spread pro- 
ficiency in the arts, their love of ideas and their 
ability to express them, what is it for us, who have 
so few resources in ourselves? Even now our free 
hours bore us ; we have many ideas but cannot" ex- 
change them, and though beautiful arts appeal to us, 
we are untaught to practice them. "VVe particularly 
need that teaching which has gone from the curric- 
ulum — the teaching of the humanities, of the things 
that increase the enjoyment of leisure. No doubt it 
is vain to restore them in their old form; better to 
build them up again by training all the humane 
aptitudes of which we are conscious. If the univer- 
sity has lost its students of Greek, let it serve the 
larger number who would study painting, sculpture, 
singing, writing, dancing. It takes courage to men- 
tion the dancing before one's scholarly colleagues, 
but the truth is that Americans love dancing better 
than any other art — I had almost said, better than 
any other occupation. The soldiers abroad danced 
wherever there was a smooth floor and a little music. 
The fact that they danced with each other showed, I 
suppose, that it was the art which interested them. 
Even when there were girls to dance with, the art 
transcended courtesy ; she who danced best had the 
partners. If dancing is our one talent, why should 
we not increase it? Serious it now is; why should 
it not be significant? If the graduate faculty hesi- 
tates to instal a practical course in dancing, how 
inconsistent of them to accept a documented thesis 



146 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

on the dancing the Greeks did some time ago. I 
speak of dancing, but the principle concerns all the 
arts in which we have made a beginning, and all the 
pastimes we genuinely love. 

If our use of leisure is to be satisfying and happy, 
we must learn to do beautifully and significantly the 
things we like to do — we must develop them into 
fine arts ; and it is the opportunity of the university 
to lead in this development. In music we love rag- 
time; the opportunity is to build up out of those 
rhythms a national music, noble and sincere. Other 
schools of music are far better developed, but no 
other so well expresses us, our kind of humor, our 
kind of sentiment. If in a hundred years ragtime is 
transformed into the art it should become, and if 
we university professors meanwhile do not see light, 
theses may be written on the early symptoms of 
American music in 1919. But if the university is to 
be a leader, it will help create the art, not wait to 
glean in the footsteps of the creators. Let us say 
much the same thing of the cinema. We are devoted 
to it heart and soul. The opportunity then is to raise 
it from an appetite of the nerves to an art. I admit 
I do not know how this is to be done, but that is only 
my ignorance. I have seen the soldiers in France 
by the thousands watching the films in huts and halls 
and dug-outs. They were all too expert in what 
they saw not to know that the performance Ln such 
conditions must be poor. It seemed that they were 
too expert to be satisfied with any film that can be 
seen to-day. One had a queer sense that they 
watched the screen with hunger for the beauty that 
will some day appear on it. All arts develop out of 
such a popular interest, whenever the leader appears 



UNIVERSITY LEADERSHIP 14(7 

to direct that interest; and what excuse shall we 
make, if the university is not equipped for such 
leadership ? 



IV 

I know what quesuxons will arise in the minds of 

many sound scholars and good citizens when this 
proposal is made, to put the universities more than 
ever at the service of the community. They will 
ask if in this program there is not danger of over- 
looking the one service which a university is pecul- 
iarly destined to render, the service of scientific in- 
quiry. It is well to impart the skill to earn one's 
living and the skill to enjoy leisure, but, they will 
say, in these matters perhaps the university should 
be content to impart the principles, permitting other 
agencies to direct the practice; otherwise we may 
lose the ideal of truth-seeking for its own sake, and 
by descending into the arena, though with the best 
of motives, we may ourselves lose some of the vision 
it was our wish to share. The pursuit of truth, they 
will say, involves sacrifice and abnegation; the 
greatest scholar cannot expect to be also the pop- 
ularizer of his scholarship, and the university, if it 
would serve its true ends, must be content with the 
discovery of truth, leaving the spread of it to insti- 
tutions closer to the daily interests of men. 

With much of this questioning attitude I sym- 
pathize. The life of scholarship does indeed involve 
abnegation and sacrifice, and there are many sub- 
jects, of the utmost importance to human welfare, 
which can be appreciated only by the specially 



148 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

trained. Some aspects of truth never have been 
popular and perhaps never will be. But there is 
a difference in subjects ; some aspects of truth have 
always been popular, and the study of them involves 
no sacrifice of the larger audience, nor any retreat 
into esoteric realms. 

There is danger that a scholar, overlooking this 
difference, may come to regard the small audience 
as a necessary proof that his scholarship is im- 
portant. Certainly a perceptible distrust arises in 
any faculty when one of its members draws 
numbers to him. "If we stooped to make our 
subject popular," they seem to say, ''we too could 
have such a following." But the truth is that their 
subject can be made popular or it cannot ; if it cannot 
be so made, there is no opportunity for them to 
** stoop," and if it can be so made, I, for one, find 
it difficult to forgive them for reserving it within 
a limited circle. Those subjects which are most the 
creations of the human mind and have therefore to 
the greatest degree a logical and necessary architec- 
ture — subjects like mathematics or the sciences — 
must be studied in a given order; if we have not 
taken the earlier steps, we cannot take the later. 
But those subjects which at every stage represent 
or describe the same thing — literature, history, phi- 
losophy, let us say, which in every age and in all 
lands give an account of life — these subjects can be 
entered at any point, as life can be begun at any 
moment, and though they have purple patches, 
they have no inaccessible altitudes; in fact, in 
these subjects the altitudes are often marked by 
those authors who have had the widest audience. 
In our university and college catalogues, as 



UNIVERSITY LEADERSHIP 149 

any one can see who cares to turn the pages for 
a few successive years, the teachers of literature, 
of history and of philosophy have recorded their 
own inabihty to define what is an elementary course 
in their subject and what is an advanced course. 
Sometimes we teach modem thought first, and af- 
terwards ancient thought ; sometimes we reverse the 
order ; sometimes we throw chronology to the winds, 
and quite simply invade the subject with a study of 
miscellaneous authors or periods. It really makes 
little difference. Yet the scholar's wish to have his 
exclusive moments leads the teacher of literature to 
yearn for some difficulties in his field comparable to 
the splendid obstacles that engage the biologist or 
the chemist, and having no difficulties at hand, he 
creates them. Hence the arduous advanced courses 
in Shakespeare, let us say (prerequisite. Freshman 
English and at least two other English courses num- 
bered above thirty). Since Shakespeare designed 
his art for a fairly average audience, one suspects 
that those things in Shakespeare which only 
the chosen can understand are not Shakespeare 
at all, but the impediments of a self -deceived peda- 
gogy. 

If the university should be thrown open to the 
world — if, for example, we allowed in our class- 
rooms any who desired to enter, there might at first 
be embarrassment and confusion, but there would be 
no vulgarization of any scholarship that really is 
on the frontier of truth. Those classes which only 
the few can follow, would be attended only by a few. 
In such a small audience I should recognize the pe- 
culiarity of the situation, the difficulty of the subject, 
but I should not on that account hold the scholar 



150 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

necessarily in high esteem. Those classes which any 
one might follow would be attended by large num- 
bers. In those numbers I should recognize again 
the nature of the subject, but I should not count the 
attendance necessarily to the credit of the teacher. 
I should admire only the scholar, whether in the 
narrow paths of science or in the open fields of let- 
ters, who sought truth with his whole heart, who 
shared it with the greatest number of his fellows 
whom he could reach, and who so envisaged his sub- 
ject that it became a measure of the whole of life, 
and therefore of the whole community. Truth is 
for all men, but some men are less prepared for it 
than others. The task of preparing the more igno- 
rant is a necessary task; in the eyes of scholarship, 
however, it is sometimes considered less dignified 
than the companionship of the learned. No doubt 
it would be a waste of genius to set a great mathe- 
matician teaching arithmetic in the third grade. But 
if one says to us, ^'I cannot cheapen my pursuit of 
truth by making my work available for the many — 
only the trained mind can appreciate what I am do- 
ing," we may be pardoned for finding in the re- 
mark no proof of greatness nor of scholarship, but 
rather an indication that the speaker values too high 
his own intelligence and too low the intelligence of 
others. 

Let the university remain indeed the citadel of 
scholarship and of disinterested research — rather I 
would say, let it become such a citadel. But let 
us remember also that true scholarship has a kin- 
dling power upon all who approach it. For that rea- 
son I would permit the community, men and women, 
to come as near to scholarship as they may wish. 



UNIVERSITY LEADERSHIP 151 

Pernaps they may astonish us by the loftiness of 
their own conception of scholarship. At least they 
would be more likely to approach scholarship in a 
wholesome spirit if they could see that in the thought 
of the university itself even the highest scholarsEip 
touches hands naturally with a humble desire to 
know. Let us therefore break down still further the 
artificial walls between what have been wrongly 
considered separate fields and separate stages of 
knowledge. Life is one, and society under all its 
complexities is one, and the teaching of the univer- 
sity, whatever the differences of emphasis, must re- 
gard the whole life and all the needs of society. 

To think of life and society as a whole is to re- 
turn to our present needs and to our hope of satis- 
fying them. An adequate motive toward civilization 
can be discerned in man's renewed desire to be com- 
pletely a man. Therefore we have courage to dream 
of the worker as intellectually master of the whole 
plan in which he builds a section; to conceive of 
mankind at their tasks as differing only as to the 
tools and the materials, not at all as to the dignity 
nor the value of the labor; to conceive of mankind 
at play as differing only in their talents, but all alike 
trained artisans of happiness and beauty. This part 
of our ideal may be realized with or without our aid. 
We have courage also to imagine the community, at 
work or at play, finding its unity, its communion, 
its guidance in the university. This part of our 
ideal will be realized when the university says to 
the community: Whatever you do, whether for use 
or for pleasure, can he done heautifuUif. I am here 
to show you the way. Whatever you do has a mean- 
ing also. I awo here to, tell you what it means. That 



152 DEMOCRACY AND IDEALS 

/ am here at all, after the centuries, is a sign that 
those long dead, ivho hade me say this to you, 
touched the work of their hour with the enduring 
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